


The Soldier and the Parade

by stele3



Series: The Soldier and the Parade [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: BDSM, Canon-Typical Violence, Dissociation, Dom/sub, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Masturbation, No shame november, Songfic, Steve Rogers/OFC - Freeform, Sub-Drop, Torture, Whump, canon character death, my chemical romance - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-03 14:54:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 49,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5295563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an AU that assumes Bucky Barnes escaped from HYDRA long before Steve Rogers was dug up from his iceberg. </p><p>It also assumes that Bucky Barnes is a huge fan of My Chemical Romance.</p><p>This is dedicated to all my bandom bros. I love you all and I have no fucking shame.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. And if you get to Heaven/I’ll be here waiting, baby

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings can be found at the end of each chapter. If I miss something, I deeply apologize; please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll add it.

When Barnes gets the call, he’s in Beijing. There’s a HYDRA officer trying to burrow his way through the ranks of the local police force; most of the HYDRA rank and file had done the same once they’d heard the news, and Bucky has had to hone his espionage instincts in order to dig them out.

He calls them “instincts” instead of “training.” If he was ever trained in espionage, he doesn’t remember it; everything comes as an unexpected surprise, from the ability to speak Mandarin to his knowledge of Unix systems.

The call comes on the burner phone that he’s never burned, the one he’s always kept charged. Seated on his futon with two pencils stuck in his hairbun and another in his mouth, a warm laptop on his thighs and the incessant honk of cars outside, Barnes stares at the phone for 8.7 seconds without moving.

At 8.8 seconds he spits out the pencil in his mouth, grabs the phone, puts it to his ear, and says, “Have you heard the news?”

“That you’re dead,” Clint Barton says back, then laughs in a way that tells Barnes there’s absolutely nothing funny about anything. “Dude, you have— _no_ idea how appropriate—”

“ _What_.”

Clint stops, takes a deep breath. “They found Steve Rogers. Stark Industries, found Steve Rogers, in the Arctic.”

There is a 5.3 second pause as Barnes absorbs that news. Outside, the cavalcade of horns continues.

“So what?” Barnes asks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No trigger warnings for this chapter that I can think of.


	2. I don’t love you like I loved you yesterday

When Barnes gets home to his Harlem apartment, he discovers one of the cats has given birth in the middle of his mattress.

“For fuck’s sake,” he groans, glowering at the skinny mother cat, who glares right back over the five heads currently suckling at her side. Unless one of the others has gotten hit by a car or ran away—unlikely, since Barnes has three auto-feeders and leaves the window cracked open so that all but the fattest cats can get in and out, because he is a _sucker_ —then that brings his grand total to nine cats.

He’s going to need _so_ much more flea treatment.

Grumbling about freeloaders, he dumps more kibble in the auto-feeders and makes his way into the living room to grudgingly admire the dead rodents left for him before tossing their bodies out the window into the dumpster four stories down.

One of the bodies “accidentally” goes astray and hits the asshole from the first-floor apartment, who’s smoking next to the dumpster. “What the fuck?” the asshole yells.

Barnes flips him off and slams the window shut. Fucker always dumps his cigarette butts in the dumpster; seven months ago it caught fire and stank up the whole building, but were those two things connected? Oh no, of course not.

After lighting his own cigarette, Barnes eases down onto his sofa, kicks up his boots on the crate containing a PG-15V, and exhales a long plume of smoke that contains the forty-nine hour roundtrip in a cargo plane, three weeks spent in too-close proximity to other human beings, and six HYDRA officers dead.

Once it’s out, he pretty much just sits there, staring upward. Plumes of smoke amble across the ceiling. A couple of the friendlier cats come by to join him; Barnes pets them absently.

After a while, something buzzes on one of the three phones set up in a row across the kitchen counter. Groaning, Barnes heaves himself up and goes over to check it. The Life phone is reading its regular four-hour alarm: “EAT AND DRINK.” Barnes jabs the alert to kill it, takes a deep breath, and gets one of the MREs out of the fridge along with two bottles of water. He puts two bottles of water in the fridge from the collection stacked next to the fridge. He opens the MRE, takes out the freeze-dried entree, and inspects it. Ratatouille.

One of the cats jumps up on the counter. “The fuck is ratatouille?” Barnes asks it. The cat meows. “No, fuck off. I’m eating it, whatever it is.”

Dumping water and the chemical tablet into the bag built into the entree’s side, Barnes places it near a window and bats away the curious felines who come to investigate as the bag expands and begins to steam. While that cooks, he chugs the first water bottle.

One of the phones buzzes. Not the Life phone, nor the burner phone he’s never burned.

It can fuckin’ wait.

From the weak light outside, it’s morning, which means that pretty soon the Life phone is going to remind him to shower. Barnes decides to beat it to the punch and heads to the bathroom while his morning food cooks and cools. One of the cats had puked in the shower at some point while he was gone; Barnes scowls and cranks the hot water on, washing it down the drain before dumping the last of his bleach across the shower floor. Thank God Sam showed him how to get groceries delivered; Barnes only tried going into a supermarket the once and he still remembers that agony with an almighty wince. He steps into the now-bleached shower and washes himself quickly and carefully, top to bottom: scalp, ears, nose, neck, shoulders—used to be an effort to touch the left one but he’s...gotten better at it—armpits, chest and belly, dick and balls, ass, legs, feet.

He comes out of the shower in a towel to discover one of the cats has pulled his ratatootle down from the windowsill and is trying to chew through the plastic.

“Fuck off!” he yells, waving his hand at the cat. It skitters away and hisses at him. Barnes hisses back and grabs the MRE. It burns his hand and he yelps, dropping the towel to catch the food in his metal hand.

The not-Life and not-non-burner phone buzzes again.

“Fuck off,” Barnes snaps at the cat, at the phone, and stomps naked into the kitchen to eat his food over the sink. Ratatouille is actually pretty good, not that Barnes tastes it that much. Food is less a problem these days—a few times he’s even found flavors he likes—but it’s about on par with taking a dump: something unpleasant but necessary to survival that he’d rather do in private.

The cats didn’t get that memo, because three of them line up to watch him eat. Barnes glares at him while he chews.

When he’s worked his way through the entree, the crackers, the fruit, and the nut and raisin mix, Barnes drinks the second bottle of water, turns off the shower alarm when it goes off, and lights another cigarette. He smokes it standing naked by the kitchen counter, staring at nothing.

He decides to go see Sam.

As a rule he doesn’t see Sam every time he’s in town. After four years of seek-and-destroy and SHIELD’s fumbling yet determined internal purges, there’s not actually that much left of HYDRA; but they aren’t the only ones who’d like to get their hands on the Winter Soldier if they found out he’s alive.

So he dresses up in his favorite human costume: boots, skinny black jeans, thick studded belt, baggy black hoodie, fingerless black gloves (that actually have fake finger coverings on the left one), giant clunky fake glasses, and most importantly a thin ring of black eyeliner around each eye. With a fake lip ring—he’d experimented with piercings but his body heals too fast—and his long hair hanging in his face, he looks nothing like an assassin and more importantly nothing like the face in the vast quantity of history books and printouts stacked in the corner of his living room.

He does, apparently, look like an _emo hipster_. It’d taken him a while to figure out what that occasionally-contemptuous whisper meant.

The trip down to the VA is...only moderately painful. Barnes spends it staring at his Life phone and pressing buttons on the calculator and not thinking about how he’s in an enclosed space with strangers. 9 cats / 3 feeders = 3 cats per feeder. 484 calories in a cup of dry cat food / 3 cats = 161.33 calories. Not enough. He’d need to up the auto-feeder dispersal schedule once the kittens started taking dry food, or find a wet cat food feeder of some kind.

The VA is open but Sam hasn’t arrived for the day yet. Barnes lets himself into Sam’s office to wait. He’s only been in there ten minutes before there’s a jangle of keys and the door opens. “Oh Jesus fuck.”

Barnes moves his face into a human smile and stays seated. He’d turned the chair in front of Sam’s desk to partially face the door; he leaves his hands sitting on the armrests.

Sam checks the hallway before pulling the door closed and locking it. “You,” he says, pointing at Barnes with a hand holding a half-eaten bagel, “are an asshole. I’ve told you about breaking in—”

“The front door was open. I only picked the lock on your office.”

“Oh yeah, that’s a _lot_ better.” Sam skirts around the edge of the room to get behind his desk. He collapses into his padded chair, setting his travel mug down with a thud and taking another bite of his bagel.

Barnes turns his chair to face Sam then settles in to wait while Sam chews, drinks some coffee, and visibly prepares himself.

“So,” Sam finally says with a deep sigh, “how’ve you been?”

 _Fine_ , Barnes used to say, but now he says, “Normal.” Part of the therapeutic process has been to recognize that he is not anything approaching _fine_. He is _coping_.

“You eat anything today?”

“Yes, and drank water.” The Life phone had been Sam’s idea.

“Good. How’re the cats?”

“Normal. Do you want a kitten?”

“Another one? Seriously? Okay, fine, I’ll ask the nieces and nephews. How many you got?”

“Four. Tabby. Can I get flea treatment delivered?”

“Uh. I’ll check. How’re you sleeping? Any nightmares?”

Plenty. Always. “Normal.”

Sam nods slowly, narrowing his eyes. “So whatcha doing here?”

“You know why I’m here.”

Sam’s eyebrows rise. “Captain America?”

“Yes.”

“Figured.” Sam chuffs a laugh, rubs a hand over his face. “Y’know, I gotta tell you—for the longest time I didn’t believe you. I mean, the whole thing—Bucky Barnes, cryofreeze, brainwashing...no offense, but it sounded insane.”

“You thought I made it up.”

“I thought you had _psychosis_. But then the whole thing with Senator Pierce went down, and SHIELD...and it’s real, isn’t it. You’re...really James Barnes.”

It’s not said like a question, but he’s looking at Barnes like it is, so Barnes says, “Yes.” He could offer more conclusive proof—God knows _he_ hadn’t been sure, the first time he saw that name in a HYDRA file—but that would mean revealing the extent of his relationship with SHIELD.

If official distrust and a position as Fury’s favorite private contractor could be called a ‘relationship.’

Sam leans his elbows on his desk, his arms folded. “So are you gonna go see him? Will they _let_ you see him?”

“They want me to.” Clint had warned him of such, and his non-Life, non-burner phone has been buzzing with the request ever since. “They think I’d be able to tell if he’s a plant or a clone.”

“Would you?”

Not for the first time, Barnes states, “I don’t. Remember. Anything.” Not from lack of trying: he’d spent the last five years piecing together the previous sixty-four. Nothing, not HYDRA archives or history books, has sparked his dead memories to life. Eventually he’d stopped trying. “I wouldn’t know him any better than anyone else.”

“Maybe he’d know you?” Something must happen to the human face Barnes has on, because Sam’s eyes widen and he leans back. “Oh. That’s what’s got you scared.”

Barnes fucking _hates_ it when Sam figures something out before he does.

He gets out of therapy and heads to the bus station, boarding from Cropsey to Midtown. He knows that James Barnes used to live in Brooklyn; his name is all over the borough, Barnes Avenue and The Bluejay Tavern. It used to anger him that he’d automatically made his home in the place that his human person used to live, even before he knew the meaning behind those names; but he’s gotten past that, in the five years that he’s been alive.

He knows that it’s been five years only because 2007 is when _The Black Parade_ came out, and the first time Barnes heard _The Black Parade_ , he’d been driving across the Canadian border in a stolen car.

It might actually be his first real memory. Everything before that is kind of a haze. He knows he escaped HYDRA somehow: he can’t remember why, what the impetus was after all that time, all those decades of pain and terror and blood, or what slip-up in security had occurred that allowed a moment’s defiance to explode, literally, into revolt, and from revolt to escape.

All the car’s windows had been shattered by grenade blasts and there was ice on the dash. The car’s previous owner had been a lowly HYDRA tech—now quite thoroughly dead—who’d had better taste in music than in employers, and when the car started so had the CD inside its radio player.

At first Barnes—though he hadn’t known that name at the time—hadn’t paid attention to the music or anything else that wasn’t getting away from the smoldering wreckage behind him. He was still dazed from the drugs, which lent a surrealistic edge to, well, _everything_. He knew he was cold. He knew he had to keep going, fast. But other than that, the miles and music blurred past, the singer’s nasal voice no more noticeable to him than the many conversations the techs and handlers had conducted over his head. But then…

But then he’d heard artillery.

 _Mama, we all go to Hell_ , the voice in the car had told him.

Since then the whole album has become a totem: it was there at his birth, screaming down those frozen roads and running from something he didn’t even know. He doesn’t listen to _Mama_ anymore as a rule, and saves _Welcome to the Black Parade_ as a last resort on the very worst of days.

Barnes listens to everything after _Mama_ as he rides the bus though Sunset Park and the tunnel to Manhattan. When the jangly melody of _Blood_ finally fades, he peels his earbuds out and turns to the woman who boarded five minutes ago and has been sitting next to him ever since. "И кто ты на этот раз?"

“Natalie Rushmore,” Romanoff answers. Her hair is even redder than the last time he saw her. It’s actually more reddish-brown, naturally: Barnes has seen childhood photos from her KGB induction files, the ones that list him as her trainer.

That’s what had saved her when SHIELD got her in their sights. Not his doing—oh no. He’d been all for shooting her. It had been the big, dumb, bleeding heart known as Clint Barton.

Instead they’d brought her in, Clint and Barnes, to a low-level safehouse. Nothing very secure: back then, in the shadow of Pierce’s death and the subsequent reveal of HYDRA, Fury hadn’t been sure what to make of Barnes and they’d had little to no backup. Just him, a rawboned carnie convict, and a Widow in a shack outside Madrid.

Once she’d shaken off the tranq dart she’d smiled and purred and let her legs fall open. Clint had snorted. “Close your knees, honey. You’re like twelve and I’m gay.”

Her eyes had flicked over to Barnes, who’d been in the back of the room fuming at Clint for blocking his shot at her head. “My dick doesn’t work,” he’d snapped, and Clint had busted up laughing.

He’s worked with her a few times since then, though not as much as either of them has worked with Clint. He’s the glue that holds their trio together; without him, Barnes and Romanoff tend to circle one another, eyeing their weak points.

He’s not here now but Natalie Rushmore is all business, clunking ahead of him in her work heels. She leads him to a car and from a car to a giant building with the Stark Industries logo. When he wordlessly raises an eyebrow, she explains: “Howard Stark won a copyright lawsuit in the 60’s. He argued that since Erskine was dead, any rights to Captain America’s biological tissue fell under the scope of Stark Industries. When SHIELD first found him they assumed they were dealing with a body, so they turned him over to Stark.”

Barnes snorts a laugh. “Stark must have been disappointed to find out he’s alive.”

Her lips quirk without humor. “I wouldn’t count out the current Stark’s fanboy tendencies.”

They head inside the building. Barnes has mostly gotten past the instinctual fear, the voice in the back of his head that warns him the second he lets down his guard there will be restraints on his arms and a needle in his neck. Fury may not trust him, but he needs the Winter Soldier more than he needs a scapegoat.

The man himself is waiting on the lobby with a one-eyed glare. “Glad you could make space in your busy schedule, Barnes. You look like a God-damned goth.”

That’s a new one. Pretty rich, too, coming from a guy dressed in all black. Barnes falls into step behind Fury, Natalie Rushmore bringing up the rear, and follows him past a metal detector that shrieks at his arm and does nothing to stop them.

Inside the elevator, Fury grumpily submits to a handprint scan then resumes glaring at Barnes. “Nice of you to keep me informed about your Beijing operation.”

“You said you wanted plausible deniability.”

“What I _want_ is some kind of warning before I get called at three in the goddamned morning by two different oversight committees and the Chinese consulate. I’ve already got every American lawmaker living in my colon, and you just jammed in a few hundred more pissed-off Chinese.”

Barnes meets Fury’s gaze. He’s told he has a very intimidating stare, mostly by Sam who begs him to _blink for fuck’s sake_. “I don’t answer to you. That’s the deal.”

They’d made that bargain at gunpoint two years ago, in the bedroom of Fury’s private home. It’d been three weeks after Barnes had assassinated William Pierce and four days after Fury and a handful of his deputies had survived an attempted coup and subsequent shootout at SHIELD headquarters. The deal is simple: in exchange for resources Barnes became Fury’s trump card, a hidden asset outside SHIELD and the spiraling web of investigations, oversight, and diplomatic nightmares that erupted after the reveal of HYDRA in its ranks.

Fury shuffles the matter aside with a scowl and finally gets to the real business: “They’re bringing him out of induced coma now. His brainwaves look stable, so we’re expecting him to wake up in the next few minutes.”

A jerk of Fury’s chin produces an electronic tablet from Natalie Rushmore’s arm. Barnes’ hands take it; his body does this sometimes, moves without conscious direction. They know how to hold this device in his metal hand and use his flesh fingers to touch the screen, make the data scroll up and down.

The readouts look familiar. “You used HYDRA’s protocols for waking me.”

“Yes we did. Figured it’d be good to have an expert around.”

Barnes looks at Natalie Rushmore, who betrays nothing, then at Fury. “Thought you wanted me to ID him.

Fury presses his lips together then lifts his head and says, “Stop elevator, override command whiskey-golf-delta-two-nine.”

They slide to a halt with a chime. All the muscles on Barnes’ back tense up, a roll of tension from the small of his back to his shoulders. If Fury had overrides for Stark’s AI, who knew what the fuck else he could make it do.

“Unofficially,” Fury says, “you’re here to ID him. Beyond unofficially—you’re here for containment.”

The tablet creaks in Barnes’ hand. “You want me to kill him.”

“If he’s a plant, yes.”

Of course. Neither Stark Industries nor SHIELD wanted to be responsible for a dead Captain America, even if he was a HYDRA clone. “And exactly how the fuck are you gonna tell if he is? ‘Cause I won’t know.”

In the past, Fury had openly doubted the extent of Barnes’ internal emptiness. If he still does now, he doesn’t show it. “At this stage, all I’m asking for is that you keep him in the building. Elevator resume, undo override command whiskey-golf-delta-two-nine.”

They began moving upwards again. Barnes takes one more look at the tablet then hands it back to Natalie Rushmore. As he does so, he sweeps his eyes over her. Two knives and her electrical charges. Three guns on Fury. Barnes faces front in the elevator. “How many upstairs?”

“Two teams, east and west,” Natalie Rushmore reports. “Both are briefed.”

“Unofficial or beyond unofficial?”

“Neither,” Fury answers.

Behind them there’s the sound of cloth. Barnes watches Natalie Rushmore’s distorted reflection move across the elevator wall until her hand appears over his shoulder. It holds his facemask and goggles...the ones he’d left beside his bed at home.

He takes them. “You’d better have been nice to my cats.”

“I turned down the auto-feeder. They’re looking fat.”

The mask smells of rubber, so familiar that it goes down past his conscious mind to an empty place. The goggles have one-way directional lenses that turn the world flat and faintly bluish. Unreal. Barnes watches the elevator doors open, watches himself follow Fury and Natalie Rushmore out into a makeshift medbay. Watches the mingled SHIELD and Stark Industries personnel part for them.

A few uncertain glances land on him: the legend of the Winter Soldier has spread despite SHIELD’s strict confidentiality agreements. There can be only so much secrecy once civilian oversight becomes involved...which was really the point of civilian oversight.

There’s a wall of one-way mirrors. Barnes immediately discerns the setup: a 40’s-era hospital room, complete with cot and radio and ‘sunlit’ window. He’d laugh if he wasn’t currently pretending to be Fury’s mysterious, faceless cohort. As it is, he turns his goggled, masked face towards Fury.

Fury actually rolls his eye.

Stark is here, somewhere, chattering away. Barnes registers his voice as a distant concern. Inside the suit, Stark would be a threat to both Barnes and whatever person is lying on the cot inside the fake hospital room; but he hasn’t got the will to bend his power to full use. He will hesitate.

Barnes won’t.

He looks through the one-way mirror at the person lying on the cot. He is blond and huge, as advertised in history books. Barnes has read many, many history books: for the first few years of his life he’d been obsessed, even desperate, to investigate his own history. Constantly in search of a key to unlock the door inside himself.

Scattered among his cats are piles of biographies and auto-biographies of Steve Rogers and the Howling Commandoes and him, James Buchanan Barnes. It’d taken him a few years to work through them all and to bend and break every key in the lock.

There are digital medical readouts on a panel to the right of the large one-way mirror. Natalie Rushmore goes to them, taps a few things. “He’s in REM sleep now. Should just be a few minutes.”

Barnes thinks: _Vowing to serve his country any way he could, young Steve Rogers took the super soldier serum to become America's one-man army. Fighting for the red, white and blue for over 60 years, Captain America is the living, breathing symbol of freedom and liberty._

The medical crew withdraws, and security moves in. There’s a young woman in 1940’s getup. She takes a quick turn, displaying herself nervously for everyone. Based on what he’s read about the 1940’s Barnes thinks she’s way off, but says nothing from behind his mask.

Barnes thinks: _Steve Rogers represents the very heart of America. The son of an immigrant, he grew up poor during the leanest years of our country; and yet out of that hardship grew a strength unrivaled by any other, a will of spirit that outlasted the cruelty of nature or of man._

The young woman moves into position. The east and west teams fan out, move into containment protocols. Barnes knows those protocols, too, though he can’t remember ever having faced them. SHIELD learned a lot from HYDRA.

Barnes thinks: _Best friends since childhood, Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers were inseparable on both school yard and battlefield._

The person on the cot begins to move. Right away, Barnes can tell he’s not a plant—not because he knows Rogers but because he recognizes subterfuge when he sees it and there’s none of it in the hesitant, wary movements of the man slowly pulling himself up from the starched white sheets.

He rolls up into a sitting position like a soldier looking for orders, and Barnes thinks, _good soldier_ , except then the young woman walks in the room and Rogers takes one look at her and he—

He’s _angry_ —

He’s _violent_ —

He runs, and Barnes moves without thinking. It scares him, sometimes, how easy this is: obeying orders. He’s resisted being Fury’s soldier because of _this,_ the instinctive motion of his muscles that know what to do, how to obey, without conscious thought.

Rogers moves and Barnes moves to intercept, anticipating exactly where Rogers will burst through the wall of the makeshift 1940’s infirmary into reality. He swings his metal arm like a line of brick, like a metal clothesline, and gets one flash of face-to-mask interaction before Rogers hits the arm and goes down hard.

Barnes doesn’t stop to see if he’s conscious. He turns back towards Fury and forces himself to walk slowly.

In his mind he thinks, _I didn’t know him at all_.

It is a relief.

Predictably, Fury gives him a look that lives up to his callsign. Barnes shrugs in passing. “You wanted him contained,” he says. “He’s contained.”

He walks away to the elevator and leaves the building without a backward glance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Character has issues with food and sexual dysfunction.


	3. I'm the one that you loathe

Bucky spends the entire Battle of Manhattan with a raging erection.

It’s all Clint Barton’s fault.

He’d been in Sweden, minding his own fucking business and wiping out HYDRA-funded Neo-Nazi organizations when he received another call on the burner phone he’s never burned. Honestly, he’s been waiting for it: sooner or later Fury’s going to call what he thinks is Barnes’ bluff and insist that he meet Captain America for more than just a punch to the face.

He doesn’t expect Coulson to put out a conference call to both him and Romanoff at the same time in order to announce: “Barton’s been compromised.”

To her credit Romanoff responds well if the sound of breaking bones is anything to go by. Barnes mostly spends that time grabbing his passport and all his biggest guns. She heads out to find the Hulk like a good soldier; Coulson doesn’t even try to give Barnes any orders, which Barnes can respect.

Most of SHIELD’s back channels have dried up in the glare of media and political scrutiny, but Barnes finds his own way on board the carrier shortly after it becomes the temporary housing of an alien demi-god and shortly _before_ the demi-god in question goes AWOL.

This is why Barnes works alone. He _hates_ incompetence.

The jailbreak doesn’t last long: Barnes is waiting in the wings when the alert goes out and unlike the majority of SHIELD staff he doesn’t fall for the obvious threat. He heads towards the giant cage at the center of the carrier.

He’s there to sweep the giant glowy staff out of the demi-god’s hand just as he’s going to stab Coulson, then swipe it across the asshole’s back.

The asshole’s brother is in the cage but who gives a shit because the asshole is on the ground and Phil Coulson, the only jerk on Earth who might give a shit about Clint Barton more than Barnes or Romanofff, is spinning around to point a giant, fuck-off gun at the asshole’s face.

Barnes also levels the pointy end of the staff so that the tip hovers above his chest. It’s glowy. That’s usually a good sign. Hopefully alien demi-gods have important organs in their chest cavity, too.

The demi-god peers up at him, panting in obvious pain. “And which of the tin soldiers are you?”

“I’m the one they keep in the basement. Where’s Barton?”

The asshole on the ground makes a wincing, incredulous face. “You must be joking. A planet in jeopardy and everyone is asking after one impecunious simpleton—”

Barnes drives the point of the staff into the asshole’s shoulder at the same time that Coulson pulls the trigger on whatever crazy fucking shit he’s holding.

The god-asshole yells in pain as both the staff and some kind of energy blast connect with his body. His brother, who Coulson has busted loose of the holding cell, darts forward with a cry of protest; Coulson, who Barnes has never credited for shit, spins around to point his crazy fucking shit at the brother.

Right then, Maria Hill comes on the comm: Barton is heading away toward the detention lab, does anyone copy, repeat, does anyone copy.

Barnes is wearing the mask and goggles but they must be expressive enough because when he snaps his head in the direction of Phil Coulson all he gets back is: “Go.”

He throws the staff to the asshole’s brother and takes off. Yeah, a world is in jeopardy but Clint fucking Barton was the original collectors of strays, who made Barnes a grilled cheese sandwich and soup on their first mission together, the guy who’d asked if he could give Barnes a blowjob. It’d been a stillborn attempt but Clint hadn’t acted like that mattered: just sat back, wiped his mouth, shrugged, and asked if Barnes wanted a beer instead.

The memory of that kindness sends Barnes hurtling through the ship until he runs up against the solid wall that is Romanoff crouched protectively over Clint’s still but breathing body. She lets Barnes carry him to his quarters then sits down next to Clint with all her weapons at hand, eyeing Barnes as much as he’s eyeing her.

Their standoff is broken by Clint groaning, “Aww,” and then, softly, “What the fuck.”

They sit there together while Barton claws his way up from something that none of them should ever have understood. “Hey, man,” he says finally, and Barnes makes his human face smile. Clint winces. “God, that’s creepy.”

Barnes drops the expression. “Fuck you.”

“Hey,” Clint says more gently to Romanoff, and Barnes tries not to let the difference hurt.

There’s a brief, silent struggle over who gets to unlock his restraints. Barnes wins the battle but loses the war when Romanoff uses the time to fetch a glass of water that Clint snatches from her and guzzles. Did he drink anything at all while he was compromised? Did the asshole let him? Barnes wishes he’d brought a protein bar.

Barton finishes the glass and pants a little. “How many agents did I—?”

“Don’t, Clint,” Romanoff interrupts. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

She goes on, smoothing over the dead bodies, and Barnes tries not to feel resentment as Barton’s shoulders relax from their tight clench. She’s always been better at pretending to be a person than he is.

The door beeps and opens. Barnes twitches hard; but it’s Coulson. They exchange brief nods—which Romanoff solemnly copies, the brat—before Coulson levels his gaze on Barton. “It’s good to see you back. How are you?”

Barnes cringes, hoping—but sure enough, Clint’s expression has gone pink and shy. Oh God, no.

“Better now I’ve seen you, sir,” Clint brazens out, like his pink face isn’t on its way to red.

Barnes wants to stab himself. Coulson kind of looks like he does, too. Romanoff, the absolute brat, has her lips pressed together to badly hide a smile. Clint’s determined, almost resentful violation of SHIELD’s anti-fraternization rules has been going on for over a year now and has shown no retreat in the face of Coulson’s increasingly-desperate adherence to those rules.

“What’s your functionality?” Coulson asks.

“For you, sir? I’m always up.”

Barnes looks up at the ceiling and silently chants, _So give them blood, blood, gallons of the stuff_. They keep going at it for a few minutes: usually Coulson shuts Clint down harder than this but he must hear the strain that Clint is trying so hard to hide.

The door beeps but does not open. This time all four of them twitch, wary of anyone who doesn’t know basic entry codes. “Who is it?” Romanoff asks, smoothly professional like she answers the door of a private medbay all the time. That’s probably some lingering Natalie Rushmore.

“Captain,” a voice says through the door speaker then much louder, as if the speaker had recognized the microphone unit and bent down closer to it, “Rogers?”

In unison Coulson, Romanoff, and Barton all turn to look at Barnes, who only hesitates a second before digging out the mask and goggles still zipped up in the front of his tac-vest. Putting them on, he rises and steps back from the bed to settle, still and braced, against the wall.

Internally, he wonders with no small amount of bitterness whether Fury might have engineered an alien invasion just to get his way about this meeting.

Coulson opens the door and Captain America steps through. He’s in his ridiculous American flag getup, covered in high-contrast colors that draw the eye; if the suit had been designed by anyone except for Coulson, Barnes would have guessed that they’d intended to make Rogers a martyr in his first battle. A symbol of the failure of past idealism.

As it is, he can’t begin to think what Coulson was thinking, nor does he want to. Down that road are hand-painted action figurines and a preoccupation with fair men.

Captain Flag sweeps the room efficiently enough, nodding briefly to Coulson and Romanoff and visibly noting Clint’s lack of restraints before his gaze lands on Barnes. Immediately his posture shifts: he doesn’t draw a weapon but his ridiculous suit doesn’t hide the way all of his muscles tighten.

Through the intermediary of darkened lenses, Barnes studies that tension. Is it recognition? If he spoke, would Rogers know his voice?

Fortunately Coulson’s complete inability not to meddle intervenes. “Captain Rogers, this is—the Winter Soldier. He’s a high-level independent contractor for SHIELD.”

“Is he,” Rogers says. He hasn’t taking his eyes off of Barnes. “I don’t see any of your other agents goin’ around wearing masks.”

“The Winter Soldier’s identity is highly-classified.”

“Is it.” Rogers’ gaze drops to the arm and hardens. “You were there when I woke up, weren’t you? Seem to remember gettin’ a knuckle sandwich full of steel.” Though the vocabulary sounds like a laughably dated movie, the tone promises more violence than Barnes would have expected.

“He’s also the one who kept Loki from escaping,” Coulson puts in mildly. “In the process of which, he saved my life. Thank you, by the way,” he adds to Barnes.

 _Didn’t do it for you,_ Barnes thinks but doesn’t say out loud. He keeps his eyes on Rogers.

It’s Romanoff’s turn to run interference, though of course she does so with much more subtlety. “Any chance that Loki’s suddenly become helpful?”

“No,” Rogers answers slowly before he seems to recall his urgency. “But Stark thinks he knows where the Tesseract is. We need to go, now.”

“Where?” Romanoff asks, but she’s already getting up. So, goddammit, is Clint and nobody even tries to stop him. Behind the mask, Barnes scowls at everything.

“I’ll tell you on the way. Sir,” he turns to Coulson, “I’m gonna need as many agents as you can give me, and a pilot.”

“Strike Teams Echo through Kilo are mobilized and ready to go. I’ll coordinate with local authorities from the air. As for pilots, I’ll give you two.” Coulson gestures between Barnes and Barton.

That puts the sour-milk expression back on Rogers’ face but he merely sweeps his eyes over them all before commanding, “Suit up.”

And deep in the confines of his BDUs, the dick that Barnes had previously written off as lifeless gives an almighty twitch.

He doesn’t even _notice_ at first, too preoccupied with shadowing Clint’s steps and radiating disapproval. With Captain Flag still nearby, it’s _silent_ disapproval and all too easy for Clint, the fucker, to ignore. Even if he risked breaking his silence, Barnes doesn’t think Clint would listen: he’s got a look on his face that Barnes knows from Romanoff and her fucking ledger.

Barnes sincerely hopes that Fury “accidentally” drops the alien god asshole into a fucking volcano.

It doesn’t happen again until they’re commandeering a pair of Quinjets—or, well, Captain Flag is commandeering the Quinjets. If it’d been left to Barnes he would have gotten them quietly, but no, the four of them are striding right across the tarmac up the ramp of a jet. For fuck’s sake.

Then one of the air jockeys tries to protest and Rogers cuts him off with a firm, “Son. Just don’t.” It shouldn’t work, but it does.

It also shouldn’t make Barnes’ misbehaving dick spring to half-mast, but it most assuredly does.

He spends the entire flight squirming desperately in the pilot’s seat, trying not to run into the back of Clint’s jet while he finds a position that doesn’t rub his zipper against his hard-on. And that’s what it is: he has an _erection_. What the actual _fuck_.

Fortunately things start blowing up. There are giant alien serpent creatures in the sky and other aliens on flying scooters with some kind of energy guns; Barnes _hates_ energy weapons. Stark is up there, zipping around and wrecking havoc before dropping down to join them on the street as they draw in tight. Barnes waits for Stark to start throwing out wisecracks and terrible battle advice.

He doesn’t. Stark says, “Call it, Cap.”

He does. Cap is—he’s _competent_ , providing them each with a task that suits their skill set, which he apparently assessed in the five fucking minutes that he’s known them. All except for Barnes, of course, who should be on a rooftop with Clint but instead gets a wary look and a gruff, “You ready with that arm, Soldier?”

He is, but he couldn’t say that even if he was willing to risk voice recognition. His words have jammed up in the back of his throat. He lets the arm answer for him, all the plates flicking to attention.

Rogers seems to take that as an affirmative, because he nods. “You’re with me. Move out.”

Barnes goes rock-hard.

He stays that way, silently howling, as the mission progresses. He’s sure there are hostiles; he eliminates them. It’s all a daze. He shoots; they go down. Stark and Thor and the Hulk are above, leaping through enemies; Clint and Natasha slip through the cracks, eliminating those left behind; but more than any of them Cap is ahead of him, swinging the shield back and forth.

Barnes follows in a blur, shooting down any combatants who come near until they draw up together, hunched in the shadow of an overturned taxi. Clutching his side, Cap looks at him and says, “Good shooting, Soldier. Keep it up.”

After that it is bliss. Barnes stops being aware of individual combatants, or his own body; he is a bullet in motion, an action. A gesture. He knocks aside a blast of energy. It is nothing. He is nothing. Cap is at the center of a maelstrom named Barnes, who drifts along behind him on an updraft of tingling, fuzzy... _happiness_? Is this happiness?

Behind the mask, his face hurts from smiling. He is a good soldier. His Captain is pleased with him.

Eventually the euphoria fades. By then an eerie calm has settled over the epicenter of the alien attack; it is quiet in a way that Barnes instinctively knows that downtown Manhattan never should be, except for the wail of approaching sirens.

As the others regroup he slips away, sliding through the cracks of destruction and finding a wall to prop his shoulders against. His cock and balls feel like they weigh five pounds, full of blood and aching; he almost undoes his pants to attempt a remedy—he understands the principles of the thing, even if he’s never had the opportunity to give it a try—but another instinct blocks him. He mustn’t, he must _not_ do that without permission. Permission? From who? There’s no one even _around_. All the civilians who could flee have done so and the voices in his comm are focused on helping those who couldn’t.

They do not look for him, beyond Stark’s query of, “Hey, where’d the Terminator go?” Romanoff covers for him, Barton cracks a joke at his expense, and Captain fucking Flag says nothing.

He doesn’t say anything until _later_ , hours later when the five heroes of the day are hunched over a table full of Lebanese, the high of the battle crashing into exhaustion. Conversation has steadily wound down to a trickle. Clint looks like he’s about to pass out where he sits. Barnes is outside, lying flat on the roof opposite the restaurant; he should be long gone by now, there will be questions and investigations and shaky phone videos posted online. He can’t say for sure how much of an impact his presence made—sloppy, unforgiveably so, to get so fuzzy-headed that he forgot to stay out of sight. He should be miles away, but he trailed along after the little group of freaks almost helplessly, straining his ears to the sound of the Captain’s voice.

Finally, he hears it. The Captain is seated at the back of the table, furthest from the blown-out windows, so Barnes has to extrapolate from audio that Cap straightens up, putting his arm down on the table. “I’d like to know more about the Winter Soldier.”

There’s a rustle of movement, probably Romanoff and Clint looking at each other. It’s Stark who answers, of course. “Former Soviet operative via HYDRA, bitching metal arm, possibly immortal, what? You think there’s really anything that SHIELD can hide, at this point? I didn’t even have to hack them to get that—well, I did _hack_ , but not SHIELD. Just Congress.”

“He’s HYDRA?”

“Yeah, but really, who isn’t, anymore? Seriously, Cap, you need to catch up on the last five years, it’s been real ‘I-saw-Goody-Proctor-with-the-devil,’ except replace the devil with an octopus skull and Goody Proctor with dear old Dad.”

“Are you—Howard? People actually think Howard was HYDRA?”

Barnes can barely see Stark from this angle, but he can sense the shrug. “It’s a theory. Our resident Robocop brought over a lot of names when he defected, including Dad’s partner at Stark Industries, and lotsa Stark weaponry showed up in HYDRA hands when they couped the tat. So either Dad was HYDRA or he was an idiot—not sure which I prefer. You gonna finish that, big guy?”

“Nay. Whatever this warrior’s origins, he fought bravely today. What troubles you, Captain?”

“Well, he—pardon me, Ma’am, but—he had a bone-on the whole time.”

There follows a brief silence, then the sound of a boot hitting the floor. Clint’s, sliding off of Romanoff’s chair. On the roof, Barnes is frozen.

Finally Stark says, “Please...tell me that doesn’t mean what I, it does, doesn’t it? A hard-on? A stiffy? A—pardon my language, everyone, but—an _erection_?”

“The whole fight, from start to finish.”

“Um,” the Hulk’s human form says, “maybe...I mean, it’s not _unheard of_ for adrenaline to cause—”

“Doc,” Captain America interrupts, “I know when somebody’s...when the bone-on is for...you know. _Me_.”

There is another brief silence and then Clint fucking Barton starts to laugh. Barnes rips the comm bud out of his ear; his whole body feels hot, enough that he feels it must surely be visible somehow. He flings himself away from the diner, barely gauging the distance before he leaps off the roof to another.

The sprint home to the safety of his hissing, feral cats and the smell of their piss does nothing to cool him down. Fuck Clint. Fuck Captain Flag and his fucking—Barnes doesn’t even _know_ what happened, what triggered the euphoria, except the bone-deep certainty that it had everything to do with Steve Rogers.

It’s gone, now, along with his erection. In its place is a cold, juddering fear.

_Best friends since childhood,_ _Bucky Barnes_ _and_ _Steven Rogers_ _were_ _inseparable_ _in both the schoolyard and the battlefield._

Barnes skitters into his bedroom, snatching up his CD player. Instead of putting on the headphones, though, he winds up crouched on the floor of the closet, clutching the player against his chest.

If he met Steve Rogers, what would he know. What could he do. The door inside Barnes’ head has stayed shut for so long that he’s gotten complacent. Now something has slipped through the keyhole and he wants it _gone_ : his apartment reeks of cat pee and cigarette smoke but it’s _his_ —it belongs to _him_ , not Bucky Barnes. He’s lived five years as someone completely different, he’s not letting anyone, not HYDRA or SHIELD or Captain America, take that away. They can’t.

(But they could. He doesn’t remember _anything_ else, but oh, he remembers how easy it was for them to scrape out everything he had, over and over and over and over and _over_ —)

Eventually he manages to fumble the headphones on, and listens to _House of Wolves_ five times in a row, pressing the back button every time it ends. The drums pound at his eardrums and brain until the shaking stops, until he’s numbed himself with stimulation. _Tell me I’m a bad man, kick me like a stray / Tell me I’m an angel, take this to my grave_. One of the friendlier cats comes up to investigate the tinny shriek; Barnes lifts it into his arms and buries his face in its mangy fur.

When he finally comes up for air, his ears buzz in the sudden silence but his head is clearer. If Steve Rogers can unlock secret feelings and memories then Barnes wants nothing to do with him, and that’s simple enough. Today was an aberration, brought on by Clint’s capture.

Barnes has successfully avoided Rogers for months, now, there’s no reason he can’t spend the rest of his life doing just that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to sexual dysfunction. Character experiences sub-drop and some public humiliation of the non-sexy variety.


	4. Now turn away, ‘cause I’m awful just to see

Opening his car door, Sam heaves his briefcase into the front passenger seat, sits down, loads his traveler coffee mug into the holder, and sighs. “Okay. First of all, I wanna reiterate that my home is my home. I don’t bring work into my home. Boundary violation, man.”

“I’m not in your house,” Barnes points out.

“You’re in my _garage_ , which counts. That being said, I acknowledge that you made an appointment—though I still don’t know how you got that sticky note in my day planner—and at least warned me that you’d be hiding in my backseat before I actually, y’know, came out to my car and had a heart attack. That is progress, and I acknowledge and appreciate your progress.”

“I’m not _hiding_ ,” Barnes grumbles.

“Dude, you are curled up on the floor of my backseat, in the dark. Whaddya call that, if not hiding?”

When Barnes doesn’t dignify this with a response, Sam presses the button to open his garage door and starts his car. “I’ve been seeing you a lot on the news. That’s gotta be weird for you.”

“Dangerous. Deadly. Fatal.” The Winter Soldier operates from the shadows, not the glow of media attention. There are videos of him up on _Youtube_.

“You saved the world. Thanks for that, by the way, y’know, as somebody who lives in the world.”

 _Didn’t do for you,_ Barnes almost retorts, but then he’d have to explain who he _did_ do it for.

It wasn’t all Clint. Definitely not towards the end, there.

Six and a half months hasn’t diminished Barnes’ unease about his strange reaction to Captain America. It wasn’t the first time his body had reacted without input, but every other reflex—switching his grip on a knife, speaking Swahili, typing on a keyboard—have been useful skills that HYDRA would have had cause to leave intact and whole inside of him.

It is possible, of course, that they saw fit to make use of his body in other ways. Barnes considers this idea with a kind of elevated detachment—disassociation, according to Sam. The euphoria and pleasure he’d experienced doesn’t seem like something that HYDRA would have bothered to instill, but an eager servant who rushed to fulfill commands under the promise of sexual reward? Yeah, he could see that.

He stays silent long enough that Sam plugs in his iPod. The first two piano chords wash away Barnes’ blank state and he sits up, despite the fact that by now they’re moving through the streets. “What are you doing?”

“I thought this shit calms you down.”

“It does, but you can’t just—listen to _Cancer_ in _public_. You gotta be drunk and have, like, three boxes of tissues and the privacy of your own goddamn room.”

“Okay, first off.” Sam takes a hand off the wheel to lift his finger in the air. “Thanks to you I now know way too much about white-boy emo vampires from Jersey and I _know_ Gerard Way would not approve of you using alcohol as a coping mechanism. Second, there is nothing wrong with a little public display of emotion. If you gotta use the song as an excuse, you go right ahead.”

He turns back front and after a moment Barnes drops back down to the floor, curling up tighter.

 _‘Cause the hardest part of this is leaving you_ , the song moans and the drums kick in.

“I’m scared,” Barnes admits into the seatback.

Sam turns down the song a little. “This about the attack on Cap?”

Barnes scowls, but it’s true. At least partly. Sam doesn’t need to know about the rest; no one does. That shit’s gonna stay inside Barnes and rot. “They shouldn’t have gotten as far as they did. SHIELD is too weak.”

“Sounds like he did okay on his own. I heard he punted one guy through a wall.”

“That was nothing,” Barnes scoffs. “They weren’t even proper HYDRA, just white supremacists who wanted legitimacy.”

“Yeah, he’s uh. He’s really been pissing those guys off lately.” A smile curves over Sam’s profile. “Have you seen the latest batch of interviews?”

“No,” Barnes grumbles mutinously. He’s _heard_ plenty, mostly from Clint who’s still stuck on the Farm getting psychoanalyzed. Technically Barton’s in communications lockdown, but that hasn’t stopped the two of them from having weekly conversations, which Clint spends howling with laughter over the most recent way that Captain America is politely yet publicly decimating conservative commentators. “It’s stupid. He’s making himself a target.”

“Well,” Sam says in the tones of a man edging along a cliff, “maybe that’s all the more reason for you to make contact with him. They want him, they want you—maybe you two can band together, y’know, watch each other’s backs, pool your resources. I mean, I’m not sayin’ that _I’d_ jump at the chance to take on HYDRA with nobody but Captain America on my side, but—”

Barnes sits up again. “That’s it.”

Sam’s head whips around. Barnes resists the urge to shoot an arm between the seats to grab the wheel. “What? Seriously?”

“Of course. HYDRA has to be planning their own assassination attempt. They were probably behind the initial attack, as a way of testing SHIELD and Captain America both. It’s only a matter of time before they strike him—he’s too much of a figurehead, it’s too _personal_ a failure for him to go on living. So I have to get to him, first.”

“So you’re actually gonna go see him? For real?”

Barnes makes a face. “No, of course not. I’m going to stake out his apartment, wait for HYDRA to attack, then intercept and interrogate them.”

They’ve pulled to a stop at a light. Sam regards him in silence for a moment, long enough that _Mama_ has started to play. Barnes’ fingers itch to hit the skip button.

When Sam finally speaks, he says, “Man, get the hell outta my car.”

-o-

Even if Barnes had minimal training, Steve Rogers would not be a hard man to find. Through Clint and Natasha—who has warmed considerably since the Battle of New York—he learns that SHIELD had offered him a position in DC with accordant housing, but Rogers had turned them down in favor of settling in Midtown. It’d placed him within the territory of Stark Industries; but Stark’s attention is fickle and easily diverted to his own disasters.

The previous month, a group calling themselves the Sons of the Serpent had descended on the condo complex that they thought Steve Rogers called home. It’d actually been the wrong building, but that hadn’t stopped Rogers from racing next door and killing several of his would-be attackers before subduing the others.

The event had created a huge stir, not only because Rogers had used deadly force without a moment’s hesitation but because the first thing he’d done when a news camera got in his face was announce his personal address to the terrorists of the world.

Naturally that isn’t his address anymore: the flood of fans, protestors, and paparazzi—all apparently undaunted by the prospect of getting caught in the crossfire—had driven Rogers from his home faster than any midnight machine guns.

Still, he’s clung to Brooklyn with surprising tenacity. Barnes would be more nervous about proximity except that Harlem feels like an entirely separate planet from Rogers’ new cushy Park Slope neighborhood.

And anyways, Barnes was here first. He’s not moving just because Captain America is _sentimental_.

He also sticks out, even in a New York crowd. He moves differently, either a product of the serum or the time transplant, and then there’s his build and coloring, which he’s poorly disguised with a baseball cap and a pair of slacks that manage to be both too baggy and too tight. Most of his clothes are too tight, in fact, as if he actually looked at a size small and thought it somehow still applied to him.

Currently his tightly-clothed frame is moving down the street a block and a half in front of Barnes, who uses this vantage point to closely examine Rogers’ ass. It is, objectively, a good ass. Rogers’ whole body is proportionally...good. _The peak of athletic excellence_ , as the history books called it.

No part of it, however, stirs any movement in any part of Barnes. He tells himself this is a relief.

Regaining part of himself from HYDRA was not worth immediately losing it to Rogers.

In the absence of unexpected physical reactions, Barnes slips into the comfortably familiar routine of surveillance and reconnaissance. Within four days he’s identified a behavioral baseline: early riser, jogs various routes in the morning, eats every meal out—judging from the barren state of his kitchen he has no idea how to cook—and has no close acquaintances. Rogers mostly leaves his brownstone to visit the VA, which irritates Barnes profoundly—Sam is going to have to get used to visits outside the office—or the NYC SHIELD office.

Barnes reactivates old bugs for the latter but it turns out that they’re only giving him _sensitivity training_. Apparently he called someone ‘a Negro’ in one of his most recent interviews.

Rogers’ involvement in SHIELD is still unclear. There’d been some public talk of bringing him in—the hero of America! back to save us from HYDRA!—but it’d stalled out in civilian oversight committees. Barnes wouldn’t put it past Fury to bring him on board secretly, but, well, Fury’s already got a secret operative dedicated to saving America from HYDRA, thank you very fucking much.

 _You’re welcome, America_ , Barnes thinks sullenly as he gulps iced chai latte, watching Rogers try to ride the subway without knocking people down.

To top it off, the only other tails are clearly not HYDRA. The atmosphere of general paranoia left by the reveal of HYDRA in their midst means that virtually every federal agency in America has an eye on Rogers, though a few give up when Barnes subtly disrupts their surveillance patterns enough that Rogers notices them. It’s kind of entertaining to watch them get a righteous dressing-down.

Other than that, three weeks pass with few deviations from the baseline. Rogers visits Stark, who is gearing up for some new personal disaster; a SHIELD tech takes pity on him and teaches him how to Skype; he Skypes with Gabe Jones from his home in Arizona; he goes to the movies, alone, three to four times a week; he checks out seventeen books from the library, reads them all, and returns them promptly.

The man couldn’t be more boring if he tried.

Then, of course, just as Barnes is about to start planning Rogers’ assassination himself—he wouldn’t, really, too many enemies to earn; but it helps pass the time—the first deviation occurs. It’s a Friday, which Rogers usually spends at the movies or reading; but instead he spends most of his afternoon seated at the table in his galley kitchen, which helpfully has several windows. The whole brownstone does, actually. Either Rogers likes his sunlight or someone deliberately maneuvered him into a home with plenty of sightlines. He looks like a fish in a bowl.

At the moment the fish is poking at his phone with single-minded intensity. Then he gets up and tidies his apartment, comes back to the phone, cleans the bathroom, comes back to the phone, goes into the bedroom—the solitary room with no outer apertures—and comes back to the phone in a pair of jeans that actually fit his hips and a jacket that actually fits his shoulders.

Barnes warily tails him to a club—with an actual _dance floor_ —where Rogers situates himself in a corner booth that’s all but invisible to the room. Barnes has to sort of hang out near the far wall and even then he’s got no sightline. Fortunately there are other men standing against the wall: the place is a meat market, full of thumping bass and humping hips, and a ring of lurkers watch the dancers for easy prey. Barnes eases in among them, scowling. He wants his headphones; the loud music and lights are doing unpleasant things to his brain. He feels slightly queasy.

Only Rogers’ knee is visible from this angle. He orders drink after drink, always something neat and dark in the glass. The biographers said he’d liked bourbon before the war, but Barnes suspects that half of those meticulously-researched biographies were full of shit.

Five drinks come and go from the booth before a woman approaches. Barnes tenses, scanning her. This would be a perfect place for HYDRA to strike. If they did it quietly enough, no one would even notice that Rogers had slumped over in his seat until the waitress came to clear his glass. The glass! Was Rogers even watching out for poisons? Could he _be_ poisoned?

The woman’s wearing a tight black dress, her dark brown hair pinned up then tumbling back down. She has a strong, almost masculine jaw offset by delicate cheekbones. Her physique is that of a yoga bunny, not a trained assassin, and the seductive tilt of her hips looks too obviously practiced.

She talks to Rogers a little before sliding into the booth, out of sight. Another drink appears alongside the neat bourbons—something fizzy and clear, with a lime in it. Barnes could use a goddamn drink himself. There are too many people around him. Too many chances for someone to recognize him. His face wasn’t visible in any of the videos online, but HYDRA would know it...or at least the higher-ranked officers would. He’s been killing them for that. One by one, that’s how he disappears, but there are too many, he can’t—the man next to him could turn and put a needle in his neck and then the chair and Barnes _can_ be poisoned, ice in his veins—

He slams out of the club’s emergency exit, panting, and huddles in the alley.

It takes too long for him to get control of himself, and in the meantime Rogers leaves the club... _with_ the woman. The baseline for normal behavior moves drastically. Barnes situates himself in the empty building across the street and points both his sniper rifle and his directional mike at the windows. Through the scope he sees Rogers and the woman are in the kitchen, drinking more dark alcohol.

Rogers has taken off his jacket. The shirt underneath is more familiar in its sizing; his biceps long for freedom and proper circulation.

The woman stands in the center of the room and swings her Sexy Hip out to the side. “Like what y’see?” she says with a Jersey accent, which, Barnes can’t help rolling his eyes. He’s a limp-dicked assassin and even _he_ thinks that line’s a groaner.

Rogers finishes his drink without looking away from the woman. He has a tendency to hunch his shoulders—either due to the poorly-fitting shirt or the childhood scoliosis—but right now he’s straight-backed, his weight balanced between his feet. Like he’s gearing up for a fight. Barnes frowns and looks at the woman again. She’s still off-balance in her high heels, nervous but completely non-threatening.

Then Rogers puts his glass down and says, “Not sure, yet. Haven’t seen the whole package.”

He moves forward and—and usually his bulk seems clumsy, but it hadn’t during the Battle of New York and it doesn’t now: he strolls in a circle around the woman like a predator. Her whole body responds as prey, breath going visibly uneven and staring ahead when he prowls behind her, looking her up and down.

Rogers pauses when he’s directly at her back. “I think maybe I’ll fuck you up against the window,” he says, casual like he’s commenting on sports. _How ‘bout those Yankees?_

Air leaves the woman in an audible huff. “Wouldn’t have figured Cap for a kinky one.”

Unseen to her, a spasm of some sharp emotion twists Rogers’ face. It’s gone just as fast, and then he’s reaching out to the back of the woman’s neck. Her tight black dress is held up with a halter tie and another tie around her waist; when they’re loosened the dress slides down off of her. She’s wearing lacy black underwear; Rogers spends a moment staring at her thong in clear shock and confusion before he recovers.

“So,” he says in that same voice as he steps up behind her and enfolds her in his arms. One hand goes around her neck and the other reaches down to hook between her legs. She sucks in a breath and teeters on her heels. She’s not a small woman, but against the frame of his chest she seems tiny. “Window? Or should I put you down right here?”

It takes her a minute to answer. She licks her lips and swallows against his hand; Rogers rocks her slightly, holding her against his chest. “Your choice,” she finally croaks, all artifice dropped from her voice.

“Okay,” Rogers says, and swings her down to the floor. It’s a smooth takedown with an easy landing on all fours. She shrieks a little, surprised, and Rogers presses a palm over her red, red lips.

Abruptly Barnes realizes that he is kind of... _humping_ the windowsill.

Rolling away from the scope and onto his back, he stares down at his jeans. He’s tenting the front of them, his cock pressing almost painfully against the zipper. The directional mike is still on, transmitting sounds straight to his eardrum; it’s a good mike, the quality making it sound like he’s in the room with them.

“Get your knees spread, sweetheart. C’mon...there you go, good girl. Look how wet you are for me, soaked straight through your...panties. You must’ve been gettin’ wet in the dance hall, huh?” A pause, then the loud crack of a hand hitting flesh and a cut-off yelp. “I asked you somethin’, sweetheart.”

“Nnnnghod. Yes.”

Another smack. Barnes’ dick jerks. He grabs at it and then he can’t let go: his body does that thing where it remembers how to do something, a note slid under that locked door in his head, and his hand rubs along the length of his cock in one smooth gesture. Heel of his hand to side of his thumb to his ragged thumbnail scraping over the cloth.

What the fuck what the fuck.

The pressure feels too good to stop but it _hurts_. In his ear Rogers is still talking. “Take that thing off before I rip it off,” he says, and Barnes’ fingers claw at the zipper of his pants, fumbling his hard dick out into the sweet bliss of open air. The tip’s leaking, a bead of fluid hanging from his slit. He only gets a moment’s reprieve, though, before Rogers goes on. “You got sensitive tits, sweetheart?”

“Yes.” There’s a bit of a whimper in the woman’s voice.

“Good. See, I like making a gal cry a little—not bad, naw, shhh, don’t look at me like that. It ain’t like that. Just gotta be a little mean,” a whimper, “so I can be nice to you later. Just so you know who’s in charge. Right? I could be real mean, but I’m just gonna leave you nice and sore so you feel it tomorrow.”

Barnes’ hands move without his input. It’s almost like someone else, like _Rogers_ is the one gripping his cock and tugging, spreading around the pre-come. Rogers is saying things in _his_ ear that shoot straight through him, pin him down and force open all the closed doors at once.

Rogers is doing something to the woman to make her cry out again and again, higher and frantic, pleading, and Barnes arches with the heels of his boots scrabbling desperately for purchase.

“Not yet,” Rogers says in a rasp of steel and Barnes judders to a halt. His low back and thighs and testicles are straining for something that he instinctively knows is just _there_ , but he—he can’t, he—

“Good girl,” Rogers murmurs. “There y’go, settle down. Breathe. Look at you, rarin’ to go off the second you get a cock in you.”

One by one Barnes’ muscles unlock, sinking his hips back onto the floor. He breathes. He floats. He listens to the cadence of Rogers’ voice; the words have gone liquid, sliding over him like droplets. They turn him this way and that and he follows so happily, so happy to make Rogers happy and shivering only when the cadence sharpens. It happens once or twice but the rest is a long slow glide; an exhale of smoke from his lungs. Rogers reaches down into him and wrenches out one orgasm, two, three, until it _hurts_. Barnes lets him. He would let Rogers put him up against that glass window in front of God and HYDRA and Park Slope—Christ, he _wants_ it, so long as Rogers wants him to want it.

-o-

Eventually Barnes glides back to Earth, sticky and sore and shivering in an unpleasant way. In his earbud, Rogers’ voice has lost its rasp and gone up an octave. He and his sexual partner are on the couch, bundled underneath multiple blankets with her on his lap. As Barnes watches, Rogers picks up a piece of cheese and feeds it to her.

“Good?” Rogers asks.

“Mmm,” the woman fairly purrs.

Barnes licks his lips and swallows convulsively.

It’s approximately 0320 before the woman exits Rogers’ condo, and by then Rogers has returned to baseline levels of awkwardness. The strange dark confidence that had oozed from him only a few hours ago has melted completely: he stands near the door of his condo and moves his hands to his hips, to his pockets, to his belt.

“ _Well_ ,” the woman says with immense satisfaction as she drapes her coat over one arm. She smirks up at Rogers, every piece back in place. As if she hadn’t spent a good ten minutes on her hands and knees on the floor, begging to be fucked. “If Bill O’Reilly could see us now.”

Rogers hitches his shoulders up. “I’d appreciate it very much if you didn’t—”

“Oh don’t worry, honey. I’m married to a state senator with aspirations towards Washington, the last thing I need is for this little hobby to get out.”

“Right. Of course. Thank you.”

She leaves, and Rogers locks up after her before crossing to his coffee table to pick up the half-empty plate of cheese and crackers. Barnes grips the scope—his hands are shaking, more than the chill in the room warrants; he needs to check the Life phone for a cause—and waits twenty-five point three seconds until the woman exits the front of Rogers’ building. She’s wearing her coat by now, and has taken out her phone to text as she walks. Out of sight of Rogers, she shows no shift in her carriage; she could still be a sleeper agent, unaware of her mission or even her training until given a passcode—

A loud crash in his ear makes him flinch and rip the bud out. He’s withstood gunshots at close range but right now everything feels—raw, loud, painful.

When he swings the scope back up to the condo, Rogers is sitting on his kitchen floor next to a pile of broken crockery. He’s rocking slightly with his hands over his face.

At first Barnes thinks of poison, of hidden syringes or gas—but then he hears the tinny little voice in the earbud dangling from his shirt.

“Oh God,” Rogers is saying, over and over. Moaning it. Barnes has heard this tone of voice before, but it was usually emanating from HYDRA assholes with his knife buried in their chests.

“Oh God!” Rogers says louder and takes his hands from his face, slamming his head back against the cupboards behind him. His expression is wild. “Help me, please, I can’t—I can’t do this, how do I. What. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? What’m I gonna do ?”

He buries his tear-stained face back in his hands, as if he can’t bear to see the world anymore. His broad shoulders rise and fall on heaving breaths. Watching through the scope, Barnes is frozen.

It winds down quickly, if only because that level of despair is unsustainable except in short bursts. Barnes knows that firsthand. Pretty soon Captain Rogers is admonishing himself to “get a hold on it” and “shut _up_ , you cretin, stop sniveling” and “get up get up get up _get up_.” Despite the string of self-flagellation, it’s another forty-three seconds before he reaches a hand up to grip the counter and seventy-nine seconds before he drags himself onto his feet.

Once there, he turns on the water in the sink and leans over it, scooping water onto his face with sharp motions akin to a slap. The rush of water on metal distorts the mike.

Still, Barnes hears it loud and clear when Rogers pauses to stare sightlessly down into the sink and murmur like a death rattle, “God. _Bucky_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky speculates that HYDRA might have raped him. Steve engages in a consensual BDSM scene with a woman he picks up in a club; during an emotional breakdown afterward, he calls himself an ableist slur. Bucky experiences sub-drop.


	5. If you can counter the infection, they can amputate it once/You should have been, I could have been/A better son

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING** This chapter contains some awful shit, including graphic depictions of serious injury, torture, and self-harm. Please read the notes.

On the L Train Romanoff stands with her head up and a friendly smile on her face. People look at her and probably think she's an actress. A man tries to explain the plot of a recent movie. She smiles at him on the train and smiles at him on the platform and stops smiling at him on the street once she's sure that Barnes is following.

"Actually," she tells the man while sliding on a pair of large sunglasses, "Fight Club is vastly overrated. If I wanted to jerk off to toxic masculinity, I'd read Hemingway."

She strides away, leaving the man sputtering in her wake. Barnes catches up to her in a café. She's waiting for her drink to come up and smiles at him exactly as she'd smiled at the man on the train. "Who are you wearing?" she asks.

"Frankie Ro," he answers in his best New Jersey accent.

She presses her lips together just as the barista calls out an order for, "Jamia! Venti mocha for Jamia!"

Barnes could punch her.

But she's been fairly polite, putting herself exactly where he would find her and have the choice of following where she led; so he follows a little further and sits down at a table in the corner of the café.

Her lipstick leaves no trace on the lid of the mocha as she takes a sip. "How's your friend? The one you were worried about?"

Rogers.

"I don't know, I haven't seen him in a while," Barnes answers.

She frowns, surprised. "Really? You were pretty concerned about HR coming down on him the last time I talked to you."

So she knows about the few weeks of surveillance he'd done on Rogers. Likely she also knows about the abrupt halt to that surveillance, though hopefully not why. Ever since that night with the woman, Rogers and his Park Slope apartment has become a black hole to Barnes. Something to desperately avoid that nonetheless exerts a constant gravitational force.

He has yet to give in to the pull. "Aw, it seems like that kinda blew over, y'know? Why, did you hear somethin'?"

She actually looks away thoughtfully, sucking at her lower lip. He would make some subtly derogatory comment about her abilities, except she cuts him off by looking at her drink and saying, "I've been asked to evaluate him for upper management."

Barnes catches himself, puts his response back squarely in Frankie Ro from New Jersey. "What, like, for a promotion?" To work for SHIELD, officially.

"Yes."

"Well, whaddya gonna say?"

"I'm not sure," she answers, lifting her eyes to his. "What do you think I should say?"

That's why she's here. She knows about his surveillance of Rogers. This is a kindness, in case he has any...feelings about Rogers, because she has feelings of some kind for Barton, ones that can never be reciprocated but exist all the same. She wants to know if he wants her report to SHIELD to be edited in any way.

They are too much alike, the two of them. Like a couple of magnets that constantly repel.

"I dunno," he says. "He's a pretty cool guy, y'know?"

She doesn't know and he knows she doesn't know. It is a nothing statement, a place filler. He is telling her that if he knows anything, she will never hear it from him.

She says nothing back. They say nothing at each other for a few minutes, just empty comments about how her boss keeps trying to get Barnes to come back and work for him, and how Barnes is really enjoying this chance to explore his music, y'know, really figure out what he wants to say as an artist. By the end of it Barnes kind of wants to stab them both in the face, this fake New Jersey guitarist and this fake corporate drone.

Instead he walks her to her car--which is not hers; it's wired to her fingerprint but does not remotely belong to her and never will--and even hugs her goodbye.

"I hope you're right about your friend," she murmurs in his ear while they are pressed close together. Barnes wants to peel his skin back from her touch.

-o-

That sends Barnes back into Rogers' orbit. Despite Romanoff's warning, it appears that Rogers has fully returned to his baseline behavior. If there are any pings on Tindr--Barnes learned the name of the app after much Googling--then Rogers doesn't answer them.

That night has lodged in Barnes' mind like one of his more stubborn cats, darting in at odd moments to trip him up. It's there when he hijacks a private jet owned by a politician sympathetic to HYDRA. It's there when he fights some kind of errant flying robot (not one of Stark's) that made the mistake of landing in Central Park. It makes him sloppy with how much attention it consumes. He wants the memory gone and he wants to go back and answer Rogers, climb the steps to his apartment and--

And what? Rogers had called for _Bucky_ , not for him. It's a relief to know that HYDRA didn't program him to be...sexually submissive, but so far getting hard every time Rogers barks a command is about the only thing that Barnes has in common with _Bucky_.

Christ. He's getting turned on right now, sitting in a deli and glaring stonily at his Philly cheesesteak. A month and a half ago his dick hadn't even worked and now all he has to do is remember Rogers slowly tightening a fist in that woman's hair and he's got goosebumps on his neck, sweat on his hairline.

"Dude," Sam Wilson says, drawing his attention back to their makeshift therapy session. The VA center is off-limits because of proximity to Rogers and Sam put his foot down about his house and all surrounding vicinities; so, a deli. In public.

"You know normally I'm all about this." Sam gestures to Bucky's hair (pulled back in a bun, newly streaked with red), fake eyeglasses (thick-rimmed, black), tattoos (temporary), hoodies (multiple), and black skinny jeans (tucked into his boots). "You look good. I'm serious, it's a good look for you. And even if it wasn't, it's _your_ look, y'know?"

He pauses to take a sip of his smoothie. "But?" Barnes prompts.

Sam holds up a finger. His smoothie has large black orbs in the bottom, like marbles; Sam sucks one up through the wide straw and chews it with relish. Barnes wants to know what the fuck chewy marbles taste like. "But. With the murderglare you're also rocking, you look less like a emo hipster vampire and more like you're gonna pull a white-boy shooting spree."

Barnes scowls and forces down another bite of cheesesteak sandwich. It's delicious, as promised by Sam; but he hadn't seen it made and he doesn't know the cook and what if someone went into the kitchen. Would poison work on him. He knows that sedatives do; it said so in his file.

"Breathing," Sam murmurs, careful not to look at Barnes as he dips a fry in ketchup. "We can leave if you need to."

Barnes takes a deep breath and a sip of water. Two point oh seven liters of water consumed thus far today. He is drinking plenty of water and eating food in public, with his therapist. He is doing so well. "That's just how my face looks."

Sam beams at him. "Talk to me about your cats. Don't look at me like that--somebody with that much cat hair on his clothes wants to tell me about his cats. How they doin'?

"There's this one--" Barnes cuts himself off, but Sam's smile doesn't waver. "One of them likes to suck on my earlobe. I know, it's...a weird feeling. It's one of the kittens and when the mother isn't around, he nurses on my earlobe."

"They all still sleeping with you?"

"Yes. I'm warm."

"Naw, man, don't play that. They know a nurturer when they smell one. Adelaide loves hers, by the way, she named it Harry."

"Like the prince?"

"The singer. One Direction. Don't make that face--somebody that digs My Chemical Romance as hard as you do doesn't get to make that face."

"Does she want another?"

"Are you gonna bitch if she names it Louis? Seriously, don't make that fucking face. Yes, I know the boyband names, I know the emo vampire names, I am a good therapist and a more amazing uncle."

"She can have another if she wants. How...how do I stop cats from having babies?" He's a little embarrassed to ask; there have been a lot of embarrassing questions to ask. He came out of HYDRA knowing how to kill someone a hundred ways but not how to plug in a lamp.

"You can neuter them if they're boys or spade them if they're girls. Neutering is cheaper and faster but if you've got a buncha girls they're just gonna go next door and find another tomcat."

Barnes takes another bite of his cheesesteak sandwich then makes a face at it. He tries to imagine catching one of the cats and forcing them into a box. Taking them in. Bright lights. Surgery. Parts of them taken out.

"No," he says.

"Okay, okay," Sam murmurs. "Breathing."

Barnes takes a deep breath. In and out. He stares at the bottom of Sam's drink as he does so. There are more chewy marbles down there. What do they taste like.

"What--the boba? Hold on, lemme get you some." Sam gets up from the table and goes to the counter. Comes back with another smoothie and hands it to Barnes.

The boba balls are chewy and sweet. They are not something HYDRA would have given him. Barnes chews them slowly, sucking on the drink in between mouthfuls.

Sam is watching some of the other deli patrons, his head in his hand. This is something people do, in the world. This is something he could do one day, maybe. Watch people without trying to evaluate their threat or weaknesses.

"I think that Bucky Barnes had sex with Steve Rogers," he says before he can think better of it. An observation. Just looking at people.

Sam doesn't move his head, but his dark eyes flick over to Barnes. "Yeah?" he prompts. He doesn't sound surprised.

"Why aren't you surprised? It wasn't--none of the books said that."

"Books don't say a lotta things. You know the second Captain America was Black?"

"No."

"It's true. Isaiah Bradley. He got a knockoff version of the serum, too, except this one was given to him by the US government and it killed everyone else who took it--they were all Black, too. Nowadays he's got Alzeheimer's and a diaper."

Barnes has read a lot about Alzheimer's. He's read whole books devoted to research on Alzheimer's.

"You haven't got Alzheimer's, man," Sam tells him. "I've seen Alzheimer's and you're not it. My point was, books didn't tell you shit about Isaiah Bradley and they won't tell you shit about who Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes actually _were_."

Barnes sucks up another boba ball and chews on it while he thinks. He's done a lot of research on Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers, too; virtually every text uses some variation on the words 'adopted brother' and 'best friends.' There have been other exposés, too, that painted Rogers as a dogmatic racist who bristled at being made to work with nonwhite Commandos; as a rabid dog bent on killing as many enemies as possible; sensationalistic accounts of he and Barnes womanizing their way through Europe, sometimes in homoerotic threesomes; wild speculation about the serum's effect on his mental instability and how that contributed to his demise on the Valkyrie.

Most of the more personal accounts are secondhand garbage, cribbed from family members of former neighbors whose grandma maybe once saw Rogers throw a bottle at a Jewish kid and call him a slur. But that's the point: no one really knows much reliable, personal information about Rogers. The only people who could are either infamously tight-lipped (half of the Commandoes) or dead (the other half of the Commandoes and Margaret Carter, who perished under questionable circumstances in her nursing home shortly before the attempted HYDRA coup).

If James Buchanan Barnes and Steven Rogers were kinky lovers at some point then it's virtually impossible to verify from any source more reliable than Barnes' errant dick.

"It's not," he says slowly, feeling his way through the words, "a memory. There's still nothing. It's just a feeling I get around him."

Sam's eyebrows rise a little. "Chest feeling or pants feeling?"

"Pants." Barnes carefully doesn't think about the floating, happy sensation that accompanied his orgasm that night, or the sick, heavy dejection he'd experienced the next day. "I don't know...if I want it. If it came from _them_ then it's not _me_. I want to be me."

Sam presses his lips together and nods very slightly, the unconscious signal that he needs to think about this a bit. Barnes tucks into his sandwich.

Once he's done he says, "I don't want to take them in. But if I have any more fucking kittens I'm gonna need to start a cat orphanage."

Sam laughs softly, crumpling up the wax paper in his basket. "That could be your thing, too, y'know. I'm serious, I'm seeing maybe a brand of therapy cats. They could rub their little smelly assholes on your face to wake you up, get you outta bed when you been there two days--"

They are standing up from their table, Sam gathering their trays together. Barnes automatically turns with him towards the door and that's when he sees them.

Five hostiles, moving quickly in their direction.

Truck outside.

Lead hostile is wearing gloves.

Carrying something in a thick, open-topped container.

Eyes fixed on Barnes.

Lips curl back.

Two more steps and he throws.

The liquid catches the light.

Barnes could block with his metal arm. It is faster than his human arm. The vibranium is strong. Invulnerable.

Beside him, Sam has not seen the hostiles. He is still talking about cats.

The other hostiles are pulling back coats, reaching for their guns.

The liquid arcs through the air.

Barnes reaches out with the arm and closes the hand around Sam's upper arm, just below the shoulder.

He does not look where he throws Sam; just flings him backward.

The liquid hits Barnes' face and then there is only screaming, agonizing pain.

He claws at it with his human hand and the skin of his palm begins to burn, too. Acid. But no, something worse than acid. Gunshots; two hits to his legs, just above the kneecaps. One leg gives out but he catches himself on the other. Hands grasp at him and he pulls, dragging the person in and snapping their neck. He is blinded, his fucking eyes, he can't see as they close in on him. He uses the dead body in his hand to batter them away but he can't see, can't smell, can't scream, his tongue is melting, turning to liquid in his mouth that he gags on.

Hard shock against his chest and the snap of muscles gone rigid. Cattle prod. Stab of a syringe in his left shoulder.

It's a paralytic and so he is fully, agonizingly awake as they drag him out of the deli to the truck waiting outside. More gunshots, shouting. Where is Sam. He would fight, medic, saving people. Please save me Sam please.

The truck moves. Shouting, radios. The sound can't penetrate the haze of pain. Fluid drips freely from Barnes' face--blood, saliva, mucus. The acid has burned away his skin. Are his eyeballs dripping out on the floor of the truck. The bullet holes in his legs feel warm and wet with blood. He can't move. His muscles remain slack, unresponsive, but there is a little movement in the metal arm.

He doesn't try to use it yet. He has one chance, maybe.

They move and he can't keep track of the turns, how long, how many. Maybe three vehicles. God, his face, the pain blots out everything else. Barnes can feel himself start to go away just to escape, and he fights it desperately.

Vehicle stop. Hands on him, lifting him. His face sticks to the floor of the van and peels away with a fresh wave of agony. He can't even scream.

An interior garage becomes a hallway becomes a room that they leave him in. Underground, cold. He thinks he can make a fist with the metal arm but he doesn't dare try. Who is watching. Will they see. Did Sam make it out okay. The paralytic has affected his breathing, made it short and fast. It catches on fluid in his windpipe.

The acid is not acid. He can feel his body trying to heal, the itch of his eyeballs and tongue and nose regrowing, but it eats them back again. It goes on burning and burning and he can do nothing except lie there in pain.

He must lose time a little bit because suddenly there are hands on him again, lifting him. They cut his hoodies off of him. They take him back out into the hallway. He still cannot see, but he can hear a little. He hears

Down the hall there is

There is a

A hum

He does not remember but his body does and it reacts, sluggish against the paralytic but spiking with adrenaline. Shouts as he flails. Falls to the ground. He reaches with the metal arm and digs its fingers into the concrete below him. He cannot see. But he can hear

the hum

and his body knows, it remembers

fear despair death ending

_no no no please don't please let me keep this_

They heave at him and the metal fingers scrape at the floor. They fall away and hit him with electricity. They hit him again and again, on his back and arm, until he is numb and thoughtless, helpless as they drag him across the concrete.

The hum

Gets louder

In the room. Cold, cold. They stop dragging him. They argue. He can't make himself hear. There is something in his head like an alarm that goes on and on and on. A long endless scream.

His body knows the chair they set him in. He has seen it, too, but he can't think, the alarm is rising, rising, they clamp down the metal arm and the hum is all around him, now, vibrating through his thighs and his ribcage

_no no please not this_

he should have pushed Sam in front of him

he should have eaten a bullet

anything

_please no_

the hum rises

he is pulled back into it, his back arching and its metal teeth closing around him, the spark of neural stimulation pads closing in

And then the motion stops and the hum cuts off. He is distantly aware of shouting, but his brain is too busy screaming and screaming _no no no no please don't let me have this me I was doing so well please_

Fear of this level isn't biologically sustainable. Eventually it normalizes. Slowly he becomes aware of being alone in the room. The sound of distant gunshots and an occasional explosion that rocks the chair.

For a while he hangs there in its open jaws. If his tear ducts hadn't melted away he would weep; instead he breathes in soft hitches around the fluid pouring into his throat. A little of his sight has returned; the room around him is a blurry blackness. He is still in the chair but it has lost power and they have left him there to go deal with the gunshots and explosions.

He is alone in the room. His metal arm is clamped down but the paralytic has worn off. He can move his human arm. His head is held in place with straps around his neck. He rips those away first.

His metal arm is clamped. The metal that holds it in place is thick, unmoving. His fingers tear and bleed as he claws to get free but the clamps won't budge. What if the power comes back on. Will the chair recommence its sequence. What if they come back.

He thinks, he would rather die than be here another second.

He thinks, he has already lost this arm once.

He sends his weak, trembling fingers digging into the scarred flesh of his own shoulder, clawing at the skin and muscle. It hurts but not as bad as his face. He thinks it must not hurt as falling all that way, as landing.

There are voices in the room again. Footsteps hurrying towards him. _No no no._ He claws harder at his shoulder. Hands touch his back and he flails out, knocking someone away. The alarm is back in his head, louder. Someone is making a noise like the alarm. It might be him. There is nothing in him but the animal instinct to escape, get away, _no no no_

"Stand down, soldier!"

His muscles freeze. The panic continues.

"Stand down," the voice says in his ear. It's to his left. There's a hand on his back, supporting him and taking the weight off of his bleeding shoulder. "We're friendlies. We're gonna getcha outta this--thing, you got my word on that. Stand down, hold position, and wait on my command."

There are other voices around the chair, but they don't speak to him directly. Something hits the clamps and he shudders, groping blindly.

"Easy, easy," the voice says behind him. It's much closer. There's a body behind the voice, and it slides its arm between Barnes and the metal of the chair. The body is solid muscle and hard tactical armor against his back. It holds him up. The alarm subsides.

Another impact rocks the chair and then the voice is saying to pull free, he can let his arm drop, and there are strong hands lifting him against a solid chest. His body lets this happen. He is hefted, bridal-style, and someone else guides his metal arm to lie against his chest. Another voice says something sarcastic about that but his mind won't hold the words. He still cannot see, cannot smell, cannot speak.

"Okay," Rogers says, because the screech of fear has eased enough for him to know that much, "we're gonna getcha outta here now. Sit tight."

Rogers carries him back through the echoing tunnels and the garage. There are other noises, explosions and the sound of structures falling down. Every stride knocks him against the plating that covers Rogers' chest and it hurts; more than that, it bothers him that it hurts. His face is a melted candle and his arm: hamburger. He wants Rogers to stop moving so fast and just hold him like he is, his arms wrapped around Barnes' back and underneath his knees. Rogers protects small things, he knows that, and right now Barnes wants nothing more than to crawl into his pocket and never, ever come out again.

He must lose himself in that thought because suddenly there are other hands and the rushing wind and noise of an engine overhead. Air blows against the mess of his face. Rogers moves as if to release him. The scream is coming back in his head. He flails out with his human hand and accidentally grabs Rogers by the throat, the chinstrap, before finding the edge of his uniform where its stiff, high collar rises to protect his neck.

The arms holding him tense. Barnes curls his fingers tighter, his knuckles digging into the slightly sweaty flesh of Rogers' neck. There's a dip in the uniform at the front, where the higher protective sides of the uniform collar drop to allow more range of motion at the chin. It's maybe an inch of space, a gap in the armor, and Barnes desperately digs his fingers in there and hangs on.

For a moment they hang there, frozen; then the Captain straightens and hefts Barnes snug against him again.

They enter an aerial vessel of some kind. The Captain bears him into its belly and takes a seat without disrupting his hold; a smooth swing of his arms settles Barnes halfway across his lap. It isn't quite the same as tucking Barnes into his pocket but it's close enough. Barnes feels something in himself go slack--a huddled little thing reaching the end of its endurance.

He doesn't even protest when other hands return, wrapping his shoulder where he tried to claw his way free. They flush what's left of his face with something cool and analgesic. It dribbles onto the Captain's uniform; distantly Barnes imagines what little is left of his face being washed away like sludge.

The Captain doesn't move. Through the roar of engines and frantic buzz of medics, Barnes hears him murmuring. He strains to catch it, remembering soft words that followed strong actions; but then he hears, "--implore your powerful intercession in obtaining from God the Father all the helps and graces--" and he thinks _no no don't give up please I was doing so well._

-o-

He wakes to beeping machines and some kind of box incasing his head.

-o-

He wakes to panic and restraints.

-o-

He wakes to a blur of light instead of total blackness. His whole face feels stiff and itchy; one giant scab that he would claw at if he weren't still tied down.

He thinks he hears something clacking. A voice murmurs, " _Benedicta tu in mulieribus_..."

-o-

He wakes to Tony Stark.

He isn't restrained anymore. They have him on something that dulls the panic. Stark is talking, of course. "--market it to burn wards or something, oughta make a quarter billion before the end of the year. I would've had it out last year but I lacked a human guinea pig so hey, thanks for that."

"He's awake, Stark," Rogers says sternly.

"Is he! Excellent. Hi there, Mr. Soldier, this is Dr. Stark."

"You're not a doctor, Tony!"

"I'm a doctor. I have a doctorate. I have multiple doctorates. Mr. Soldier, or may I call you Winter? Hi there. I appreciate the lack of attempts to strangle me right now. You're currently in the secured medical wing of Stark Tower. You may be wondering how it is that you're alive--that is entirely owing to my genius, you're welcome. In the time it took you to travel from New Jersey to Manhattan, I managed to stabilize the frankly terrifying bioagent you were attacked with and come up with an antidote. Again, you're welcome. With the combination of a synthetic skin graft and what I can only assume is a HYDRA knockoff of the same Kool-Aid Spangles here drank, you'll be back to sporting a mask for strictly fashion reasons in no time. Or, well, probably another couple of months."

"Thank you for your help, Tony. I hope that you can, uh, appreciate the need for--"

"Oh trust me, Cap, the last thing I need is another round of subpeonas about our reclusive friend, here. Apparently having a father at the top of the 'HYDRA's Most Probable' list makes everyone suspect you have a secret super-soldier in the basement. And on that note, I don't know that either of you are in my building, if anyone asks I've been in Malibu this whole time and you conned the staff into letting you past security with your baby blues and patriotic moobs. Mr. Soldier, please let Nurse Rogers know if you have any of the following side effects: dizziness, nausea, insomnia, loose bowels, rejection of the skin graft, or sudden death. If not, don't bother me. Byesters."

His voice gets fainter and fainter as he speaks until it disappears altogether, along with his footsteps.

Beside the bed, Rogers heaves a sigh. "I'm sorry about him."

He sits back down in what must be a cushioned chair, judging from the hiss of air escaping from fabric. There's another soft clacking--something small, wood. A rosary. Why do his ears know what a rosary sounds like when it's being gathered up and tucked away.

They sit in silence for a few minutes before Rogers leans forward and says, "I'm glad that you're all right. This--this is Captain Rogers, by the way. I'm sorry, I should have said so straight away. This is Captain Steve Rogers and you're safe, I promise."

He pauses again, as if waiting for a reaction. Barnes hopes that his elevated heart rate can be blamed on fear and his still-healing body.

After a while, Rogers continues, "I realize that we don't know each other that well...I don't even know your name. But we fought together once and HYDRA, well, I've got something personal against them. A few things, actually. So I want you to know, and this may not seem like much, but you can come to me for help. Anytime. The impression I got was that they did something to...make you like you are and now they want you back pretty bad. Whatever else you've done, that's enough to put me on your side. So. You need me, I'm over in Park Slope. Hang out near the Oriental place on the corner and I'll find you."

He stands and Barnes wants to reach out. After months of silence he wants to say, _You do know me_. But he can't.

-o-

He wakes to the steady scritch of a vent being unscrewed. Not a bolt hits the ground but after a few minutes a pair of feet do.

"Aw crap, dude," Clint whispers softly.

Barnes lifts his hands and emphatically signs, _OUT_.

Clint gets him out, somehow. Still mostly blind and hampered by something wrapped around his head, he can only stumble after Clint, who is accustomed to wriggling his way across rooftops and drainpipes. Afterwards, Barnes thinks that Stark probably let them go.

When they're in Clint's drafty pickup with the night air blowing through one smashed-out window, Barnes lifts his hands again. _Tell Natasha to tell Stark that his father wasn't HYDRA. I was, and they sent me to kill Howard Stark._

"For fuck's sake," Clint groans. "Yeah, awright. Awright."

He drives Barnes to Harlem without being told, to his fucking cats that scatter and hiss when they enter, to the stink of rotten food and gun oil and hair dye. For the first time Barnes wonders what's left of his hair, but then Clint eases him down onto his own fucking bed, more familiar than Rogers' voice, and the huddled thing in his head finally gives out. Barnes has tear ducts now but the skin around them is new and tender, so he swallows back his response.

That is, until he feels an earbud very delicately settle in his left ear. It's already playing a piano G-note.

_Will you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?_

Flailing out, Barnes grabs Clint's hand as he pulls back. He doesn't try to sign anything, just grips him for a second before letting him go. Clint awkwardly pats at his hip then settles on the other side of the mattress with his back against the wall.

_Do or die, you'll never make me_  
_Because the world will never take my heart_  
_Go and try, you'll never break me_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HYDRA throws the equivalent of acid on Barnes' face, rendering him temporarily blind and deaf; there are semi-graphic descriptions of his resulting disfigurement. While captured, Barnes attempts to claw his own arm off in order to free himself.


	6. B-side: And did you come to stare or wash away the blood?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is not the next chapter. This is an interlude that belongs between Chapters 5 & 6 that would not leave me alone; I'm calling it a B-side. 
> 
> Warning for some gross wound recovery, masturbation, and whump.

He sleeps.

He eats.

He drinks water.

The Life phone tells him when to do these things. Each time it vibrates with a message the static inside his head falters briefly before returning.

His face itches. There are still big patches of missing skin over his cheek, his nose, his left brow. He puts some kind of cool cream on those areas. The cream comes out of a small tube that Clint brought him, pressing it into his hand; it’s small enough that sometimes he loses it in the sheets, or the cats claim it as a new toy to bat around. Then he has to grope after it: his vision is still blurry, hypersensitive to light. The whole bottom half of his face, which bore the brunt of the attack, is swollen and hot with inflammation.

He sleeps.

He eats.

He drinks water.

Clint was here for a few days but once Barnes got past the worst of it he had to leave. A new crisis, a new mission. He’s working with Rogers on this one, he said.

He listens to _The Black Parade_ all the way through again and again and again but for once it’s not helping. The trouble’s not in his head this time, it’s in his body. His face hurts, he’s half-blind, but there’s something deeper than that, an itch on his very bones. At first he thinks it’s hunger, brought on by heightened caloric needs in the healing stage; but doubling his food intake doesn’t drive it away. Nor does increased water. He huddles in the fetal position, naked, miserable in a way that not even a face full of acid could create.

His body heals relentlessly, powered by the will of HYDRA scientists, and he’s borne along like a cork in a stream, tossing and turning and unable to fucking _settle_. The cats have abandoned him in protest. Only the Life phone tethers him with its endless vibrating reminders. 

He sleeps.

He eats.

He drinks water.

 _Fuck this fucking shit_ , he thinks, maybe the first clear thought he’s had in days. The sudden rise of anger creates a hollow in the rubble. In that open space he thinks, _I don’t deserve this._

It’s a strange thought. He’s never considered before that the trail of blood which follows him could trigger some retaliation—oh, sure, he’s always figured that sooner or later someone _would_ , and right now that person’s probably Tony Stark. But deserving?

No. The person in the files contained in the flashdrive hidden inside his left arm isn’t him; he doesn’t remember doing any of those things but more importantly he doesn’t remember _choosing_ to do those things. He’s a goddamned fucking trauma victim who just wants to take care of his cats, figure out how to eat more than 2,000 calories a day, and occasionally kill the people responsible for hurting him.

That thought makes another space and he breathes a little deeper. When it doesn’t immediately all collapse in on him he cautiously lets himself go another step: if not this, then what _does_ he deserve? He thinks maybe Sam has been prompting him to ask this question for a while now. Fuck, he hopes Sam is okay.

It’s like missing a step or jerking awake from light sleep, except the fall doesn’t stop until he thinks desperately, _Sam is okay, Sam is fine, Clint said he was, stop._

He loses a little time and that just pisses him off more once he comes back around. Goddamn fucking brain. It breaks at the worst moments, when he think he might be getting somewhere, feeling his way to something important—

Deserving. There it is. Like a car tire finding the groove in the road, he settles back into place. It’s a bit further down the track, though, before he can answer the question with, _Not this_.

The mattress dips: one of the braver cats has jumped onto the bed. Barnes blindly reaches down with his left hand and feels a startled twitch. If it were his right hand he might feel a tentative huff of breath as he is scented—but his right hand gets clawed enough, thanks. He’s learned to always reach out with the left, even if it strains the wounds surrounding his shoulder.

 _Think of yourself like other people_ , Sam said once, _like Clint or me. You’d want one of us to eat enough, right?_ At the time he’d been encouraging basic self-care routines but Barnes thinks it might apply now…it’s just that he thinks the itch in his bones is something that foodwatersleep can’t touch.

People is too hard, but cats—if something this bad happened to one of his cats, Barnes would—well, he’d kill somebody, firstly. But then there would be petting and snuggles and more cat treats than usual and oh, that he likes. If he were a cat and there was, somehow, another him in the room, he’d want to be pet right now. Clint had done a little of that, curled up against his back, but Clint is gone now, called away by Romanoff and Rogers to act as backup, and Barnes just wants _treats_.

The idea of it alone is enough to tide him over for a few minutes, despite the endless burning pain of his face. The details remain pretty abstract: from what he’s gathered a lot of normal-people indulgences involve chocolate and footrubs and shit. If somebody tried to touch his feet he’d probably gut them on reflex and not realize it until he hit intestines.

Somebody…some random faceless person. Another him, but no, he can’t really imagine that. He’s still relying on a phone to tell him when he should eat; taking care of another him would probably end in disemboweling, too.

Clint, then. Clint, back to squeeze his hands and bring him food in bed and make grossed-out noises when Barnes accidentally rubs his face and re-opens one of the sores—

Or someone else.

It’s like feeling his way after a dropped lotion bottle in a box full of angry cats. He thinks, _someone else_ then waits for the heaving, clawed animals in his brain to either rip him apart or settle the fuck down. Eventually it’s the latter and he digs in. Thinks, _Steve_.

If Steve were here.

If Steve were actually here there would be questions and uncertainty and Barnes would be entirely preoccupied with wondering how much of his fucked-up acid burn of a face is recognizable right now. But dammit, if there was—if some Steve from outside everything was here, if he had a Steve that was somehow in stasis of thought and wouldn’t ask or wonder or _know_ —

He pictures that Steve hunkered down at the bottom of the mattress, holding his distance for the moment. _Hey pal_ , he imagines Steve saying.

Would he talk like that? All old-timey and stuff? He’s from the 40’s, after all. Barnes has only heard him talk a few times—and isn’t that weird, that he’s only _met_ this person three times (four if he counts punching Rogers in the face right after he woke up) and yet somehow he’s become…this.

Refocus. Barnes resists the urge to punch his own brain in the face.

 _Hey pal_ , Steve would say. _You’re lookin’ pretty beat up._

Barnes gingerly curls in the fetal position. He has to be careful lying on his left side: he really did a number on his shoulder, trying to rip the metal arm off to free himself. He nods.

 _It’s okay now, it’s over._ Imaginary Steve rests one hand on Barnes’ ankle. Not rubbing, not holding, just lightly resting his big warm palm. _You don’t have to do anything else but lie there and heal up. I’m gonna take care of you now._

Barnes whimpers a little in his throat. In his head, that warm palm transports to his back, gently stroking his sides and moving up and down his spine. Steve could stretch out behind him on the bed—not touching except for that one moving hand, not holding him down, just lying close enough for Barnes to feel his body heat.

Abruptly he realizes that he’s cold. There’s a blanket at the bottom of the bed that he pulls up with his toes, imagining all the while that it’s Steve covering him.

 _Is that better?_ Steve asks. Barnes nods. _Good. Anything you need, just let me know and I’ll give it to you._

Barnes squirms under the blanket. Something presses against his arm—like, _actually_ presses—and he had a moment of confused vertigo before he remembers the cat. Lifting the blanket, he lets the skinny feline curl in tight against his chest.

He imagines Steve smiling. _Friend of yours? That’s good. You just lie there and cuddle your friend, buddy. Look at the two of you…coupla sweet little things. Think I’ll keep you both as pets. You like the sound of that? I’m gonna keep you and pet you and feed you every day, and you don’t have to worry about anything except being good for me._

Fuck. Fuck. Barnes just barely stops himself from pressing his face into the dirty mattress. His dick is all warm and achy, wanting to get squeezed by something—but he can’t bring himself to reach down. He’s not supposed to do that. It’s like a language he’s not even aware that he knew before this moment: he _knows_ beyond any doubt that he is not allowed to touch himself. But Steve, Steve would—

It’s enough to imagine Steve hooking a hand around his hips. A big, warm hand. Barnes’ fingers can’t compare but he pretends and that’s enough.

 _That good, baby?_ Steve asks. He’s kind of just rolling Barnes’ dick through his hand in little rhythmic pulses. Barnes whimpers again. The fucking cat starts licking the underside of his chin and he twists away, desperately trying not to get distracted. Steve’s here, Steve’s breathing soft against the back of his neck, Steve is stopping to just hold Barnes’ dick through the fabric of his sweatpants.

 _What a sweet little thing, letting me do this to you,_ Steve says, and Barnes is. He lets Steve do that to him because he likes it and he deserves every fucking second of it, and the fucking _cat_ is butting its head against his face—and probably getting cat hair stuck to all the places that Barnes slathered with lotion earlier—but it doesn’t matter because he feels so good. Every part of him, from his cold toes to his hot dick to his tickling nose. His mind fractures, conjuring up things that he’d hesitated to even _imagine_ before: Steve fucking him, holding his mouth shut with one hand, Steve holding—holding him down because he could, he might be the only person who could, he’d just move Barnes’ body where he wanted it and _do it_ , and all the while whispering, _Look’it you, being so sweet for me. Just take it for me, such a sweet thing, I gotcha, I gotcha—_

The cat squawks when it gets shoved off the bed. Barnes isn’t sure how that happens and he doesn’t care.

Steve’s stroking his hair—no, nope, that’s not gonna work, the magic immunity of orgasm has already worn off. Steve’s petting his hip. Yeah. His hand is magically not covered with spunk, and he’s petting Barnes’ hip as it flexes and twitches. _Good job, sweetie. You just lie right there. You’re doing so good._

Eventually the damp sweatpants get uncomfortable. Barnes tries to imagine Steve peeling them off but it gets a little too complicated and he loses the thread. He wriggles out of them himself, pushing them to the bottom of the bed and curling up in the blanket.

The Life phone buzzes. Barnes groans and slaps at it, fumbling to find the fucking snooze button and hold onto the fraying edges of fantasy—but it’s unraveling around him already. If Steve were here, he’d bring Barnes an MRE, maybe feed him by hand. Except, no, _Rogers_ wouldn’t do that: a promise of help at his hospital bedside doesn’t include goddamned spoonfeeding, and that’s _if_ there isn’t enough of Barnes’ face for him to recognize.

Fuck. Barnes crawls out from underneath his blanket and spends five minutes groping after the goddamned lotion bottle then gets up and staggers into the kitchen.


	7. Another cog in the murder machine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> WOOF. I'm sorry this chapter took so long. It spanned three different computers: my old laptop, which I'd had for 8 years, a refurbished laptop that I bought from Amazon and had to return because it malfunctioned even WORSE, and this, my new laptop. Periodically I lost bits and pieces of the story as a laptop crashed or lost the file or some shit; but here it is, at last.
> 
> I started the story pre-Civil War and bits of that movie have found their way into this plot, including one thing that MADE THIS ENTIRE STORY MAKE 100% MORE SENSE. More on that next chapter.
> 
> Trigger warnings at end

There's a convenience store two blocks away that closes at 10pm every night. Barnes breaks in, takes what he needs, and leaves money on the counter.

At some point in the last few weeks--when he was still struggling to get out of bed without panicking--his power got cut off, so he sits in a windowsill and props his stolen mirror on his knees.

His face stares back at him from the reflection. Barnes studies it for a while. A cat wearing an injury cone and with half its belly shaved slinks over to sit on his feet, seeking warmth and not picky about where it comes from. Barnes can relate.

The skin around his eyes is still reddened and tender to the touch. He touches one eyelid with a fingertip, stretching it to the side before letting it go; it doesn’t tear off. His nose, when he traces it, feels slightly different...like maybe it grew back without some injury he sustained before the serum. Half of the hair on his chin is all ingrown and inflamed; he looks a goddamned teenager hitting his first bout of zits. His lips are lumpy and unformed, pink with scar tissue.

 _This is my fucking face_ , he thinks, mouthing the words. In the mirror, his deformed lips move. _This is my fucking face_.

 

-o-

 

            _Hi Sam_

_Who the fuk is this_

_Its JB_

_..._

_..._

_HOLY FCKIG THIS WERE R U_

-o-

Sam meets him at the back door of his house. He's got a soft cast on one leg and a sidearm; his eyes look wild.

"Holy shit," he yells in a whisper when Barnes drops over his fence. "Get, fuck, get the fuck in here, what the _fuck_."

His voice cracks and Barnes twitches, staring even as he locks the door behind him. Sam is shaking so hard that he's having trouble standing up; he grabs the back of a chair and eases himself down. Barnes stands very still, his eyes sweeping the room and registering the dishes in the sink, the drawn curtains, the shotgun by the door.

Shit.

"Fuck," Sam pants. "M'sorry. Fuck. Just--just gimme a minute." He puts the sidearm down on the table carefully, fumbling to secure the safety before he hunches forward, propping an elbow on his good knee and covering his face.

For a few moments Barnes watches him wrestle with his panic; then he slowly moves to sit on the other side of the table, making sure to shuffle his feet as he goes. When Sam's breath stays uneven and the shaking doesn't stop, he lifts his metal arm, removes the glove covering it, and rests it on the table between them.

Using one finger, he begins to tap out the seconds.

Eventually Sam catches on, using the rhythm to measure his inhales and exhales. His shoulders steady. He wipes the sweat off his face. "Thanks, man. Christ, I can't believe you're alive."

Because apparently no one had told him. Of course they hadn't: all they'd known was that somebody called 9-1-1 screaming about HYDRA, which tripped the monitors in Stark Tower. Stark had used traffic cameras to track the transport vehicle; a huge spike in energy consumption--probably to power the chair--had guided him and Rogers into the facility.

Because of the arm, they'd recognized him from New York; but they only knew him as the Winter Soldier, covert operative. If either of them had traced the call back to the deli, they'd obviously not found Sam; Barnes would bet that SHIELD had confiscated the video surveillance tape in a hurry as "evidence."

Sam, meanwhile, had spent four days in the hospital courtesy of two gunshot wounds to his leg after stabbing one attacker to death and shooting another.

He'd _fought_ them for Barnes and now he winces, shifting his injured leg. Something tight and heavy rises in Barnes’ throat, but he can't get it out. Instead he lifts his phone.

            _Sorry_

A chirp across the room. Barnes goes and gets Sam’s phone, shows him the text. Sam frowns at it then up at Barnes. "Can you not talk?"

Barnes lifts one shoulder. He hasn’t spoken since the attack. A few grunts and other involuntary noises when clawed by a cat, but nothing where he actually spoke to another person. He's not ready for that yet. He doesn't know that he'll ever be, again.

Sam swipes a hand over his sweaty face again. "But other than that, you're okay?"

A nod.

"Good," Sam says then he gets up from the table and goes out to the darkened living room to lie down on the couch and cry.

Barnes doesn't really know what to do about that so he cleans. Puts all the dishes in the dishwasher, empties the bottles of liquor in the cabinets, takes out the trash. Scrubs the sticky floor. There are no water bottles in the fridge so he cleans and then fills Sam's water filter jug, fills a glass, and takes it into the living room.

Sam's on his back, rubbing his temples. When he sees the glass of water he starts crying again, his face screwed up and his palm squishing his own nose. It's awful. Barnes retreats to the kitchen again then thinks back to his own worst days and goes to find the laundry room. Does a load of smelly laundry.

"Dude, stop," Sam calls from the living room eventually. "Stop cleaning my house. C'mere."

Barnes goes. Sam's eyes are swollen but he's drunk all the water and his breathing is steady. He waves away the pill bottle that Barnes found in the kitchen; when Barnes tries to make him read the accompanying printout Sam tells him, "Last time I was on oxy I got addicted. Took me a year to kick it."

Carefully setting the pill bottle down on the coffee table, Barnes sits beside Sam with both feet on the floor and his palms resting on his knees. Sam has turned on some kind of...painting program? Judging from the picture quality it's a few decades old. A white man with enormous hair is talking about bushes.

After fifteen minutes of landscape painting, Barnes' phone chimes. He's set the tone to a single piano G-note and from the quick, sardonic look Sam gives him it doesn't go unnoticed. When Barnes shows him the text message, though, Sam's smile disappears.

"Friend of yours?" he asks stiffly.

Barnes nods. He decides to leave out the part that the friend in question is currently assigned to tail him everywhere. The attack in the café was either the last detonation of a splinter cell or the start of something bigger: the attackers hadn’t even been HYDRA, just mercenaries paid by funds that Coulson tracked through five different dummy accounts in five countries before he lost them.

When he’d examined the branching moneytrail himself, Barnes had broken out in a cold sweat. He doesn’t know why. The body remembers what the mind does not, and it knows to be afraid. He’s in no hurry to encourage Sam to leave the house, which is likely being watched as well: the friendly blonde nurse who just moved into the vacant house next door sure looked familiar.

Sam flicks his fingers. "Tell him to come on in."

Barnes sends a reply and about thirty seconds later the back door opens. "Anybody wanna give me a hand?" Clint calls over the rustle of paper grocery bags. "Naw, naw, I'm jokin', I got it. Whoops," he adds as something hits the ground and rolls.

Sam shoots another look at Barnes, who shrugs and turns back to the TV.

After opening and closing more cupboards than was probably strictly necessary, Clint wanders in from the kitchen munching on a bag of chips. When he sees the two of them on the couch he stops. "I can't believe you're cuddling somebody that isn't me," he tells Barnes.

In response Barnes lifts one hand and makes their original, rather rude gesture for Natasha's sign name: his forefinger and middle finger hook over his thumb and then spread outward, in approximation of her seduction attempt when they first met her. Once she learned ASL Clint stopped using the gesture. Barnes didn't.

Clint jerks his chin at Sam. "Hey. Clint Barton. Hawkeye."

"Yeah, I know." Sam shifts in place, clearly wanting to stand up and only just stopping himself from trying. "Come on in, I guess."

Clint plops down on Barnes' other side. "Oh shit," he says when he sees the television. "I love Bob Ross."

They spend a while passing the chips back and forth over Barnes, making small talk. Clint complains about Phil, who apparently shot Clint down hard when Clint finally tried to make a move. When they run out of chips Clint gets a tray of little finger-sandwiches--easily digestible, nutritious. Occasionally Sam will get this pinched look on his face like he knows what they're doing, but he doesn't say anything or tell them to leave so they keep powering through the awkward points, Clint talking extra loud to make up for Barnes' silence.

Eventually it's time for Sam's dose of Ibuprofen--Barnes set an alarm for it and everything--and they take that as their cue to leave. "Sorry about your love life, man," Sam tells Clint. "Normally I'd try to--I don't know, talk it out, but. I'm not really good for that right now."

"Aw, don't worry." Clint glances out over Sam's overgrown backyard, like he's just casually surveying things instead of avoiding their eyes. "His loss, right?"

Looking at his profile in the fading twilight, Barnes wishes that he could just run off into the sunset with Clint Barton. Clint had at least wanted to suck his dick once upon a time, so maybe he'd be easier to persuade. It'd be so much more comfortable for them both, but here they are: Clint hopelessly trailing after a rigid company man and Barnes in constant, ever-narrowing orbit of something that he still thinks might consume him.

Fear hasn't been enough to keep him away. When Clint had got him out of Stark Tower, he’d thought to disappear; he’s a ghost, it’s what he does. But evading Stark’s likely retribution means leaving Rogers behind, for good. Means not only locking that door in his head but barricading it and forever leaving behind this strange thing that wants to eat him alive.

There was a time that Barnes would have wanted nothing better, but now he doesn’t _know._

He and Clint split up near the foodtrucks, Clint in search of a falafel and Barnes taking to the rooftops. He still can't handle street-level traffic so he stuffs his ears full of music and does his best to avoid the windows.

It's not that he doesn't see Stark coming. He does; a man-sized supersonic jet flying at low altitudes from Manhattan is nothing if not noticeable. His natural impulse is to run; Barnes wavers then fights it down and stands with his hands at his sides on the rooftop of a large, square apartment complex.

He's reasonably sure that Stark won't just open fire on him from high altitude.

Stark doesn't. He comes in for a precise landing and leaves his facemask down, which means that Barnes can't read his lips. He leaves his earbuds in anyway. If he's gonna die, he wants to go out listening to, _When the lights all went out we watched our lives on the screen._

The song's been in his head a lot lately. There's some new movie out about Captain America and the Howling Commandoes. Sometimes Barnes wonders if other people do this, too--find deep, almost uncanny personal meaning in pop songs written and sung by musicians who they've never met.

After a few seconds Stark flips up his facemask. He looks irritated, maybe nervous. Not homicidal. He's speaking too fast for Barnes to read his lips, so he reaches up and eases out one earbud.

"--kill you but then I was looking back through, oh hey, decided to pay attention? Great. So turns out it's kind of hard to keep up a murderboner for someone after you dig through the HYDRA archives and wind up watching seven hours of torture porn. Or seventy years, I guess, for you. Or maybe seventeen days? How long were you actually awake, in between the freezer burn?"

 _I don't remember_ , Barnes says. His lips move, but his vocal cords don't.

“Right, Bruce said you’d have scrambled eggs for brains. Do you even remember them?”

At first the pronoun throws him, but then Barnes recalls the kill file. _Mission target: Howard Stark. Collateral: +1_. He shakes his head.

Something like homicide spasms across Stark’s face, but then it fades into a kind of frustrated helplessness. “Somebody wants me to kill you right now. I got a message maybe—fifteen minutes ago? Claimed to be a whistleblower inside SHIELD and sent me your current whereabouts according to their surveillance. Funny thing, the message came from the SHIELD server, no redirects, no nothing. Somehow I don’t think they’re that dumb.”

The cold sweat is back. There’s something on the other side of the door in Barnes’ head, some giant breathing presence.

Inside of his helmet his AI says something to Stark; Barnes can't hear what, but it makes the quality of Stark's gaze intensify. "That's a nice face you've got there. Mind if I scan it?"

Barnes flinches, backing up, but Stark's already flipped down something over his right eye. It flashes once. Stark's eyebrows shoot up and he flips the thing out of the way to peer at Barnes. "Hello, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes."

 _No. No._ The words won't come. Moving on automatic, Barnes lifts his hands to sign and tries not to notice how badly his fingers shake. _I don't remember being him. I don't remember anything._

There's a brief pause while Stark's computer translates and Barnes tries not to freak out completely. It feels like the whole outer layer of him burned away along with his face, leaving him raw and easily broken. Stark is still studying him and Barnes can't handle it. If Stark doesn't want to kill him then the next best option is imprisonment and Barnes can't do it, he _can't_.

He loses the fight with his own panic and bolts for the edge of the roof.

Behind him there's the whir of machinery as Stark reacts. Barnes half-expects to be struck--in the back of the head if he's lucky, the legs if he's not--but then something whizzes past him heading the opposite direction. An arrow. There's another strange noise and this one, Barnes recognizes as Clint's net arrow deploying.

He doesn't look for Clint, just goes over the side of the building and digs his metal hand into its brick surface to slow down his fall. When he hits the ground he runs.

For a while he just runs, zig-zagging with no aim except to lose his tail. After a while, though, when it's clear that Stark has either decided to let him go or Clint has successfully held him up, he starts to think.

Stark knows which means Barnes might as well have blasted a cannon full of leaflets all over the tri-state area. Depending on how badly Stark wants him, he'll either keep it quiet and pursue him in secret, or he'll go to the press and let the various world governments have a run at him instead. In both cases, Barnes needs to disappear.

 

Except, and this is when Barnes pauses in an alleyway to press his fists against his eyes. Except Stark is close to Rogers. Not _close_ , not friends or even that friendly from what Barnes has seen; but he'd definitely go to Rogers to demand information, thinking that Rogers knows already.

And then he _will_ know, and he'll come looking for Barnes, too. Somehow even worse, he'll know that Barnes has been hiding from him this whole time. A violent shudder rips through Barnes and he presses harder until he sees spots.

The ledge looms in front of him—but now it’s a choice between jumping off and being pushed.

-o-

He goes to the “Oriental place on the corner.”

It turns out to be a sushi restaurant that’s open late. The hostess blanches at his mask but doesn’t stop him from sitting down in a booth; when a waitress comes by—her manager hovering at her shoulder—he slides out a piece of paper on which he has scrawled _Rogers – 2._

The waitress grips her pen and order pad. “He was in early, on a date. They already left.”

Again, the pronoun makes Barnes twitch. A date. They.

The brown-haired woman comes to mind, and when he scales the building across the street the inside of Rogers’ fish bowl is again spotlessly clean. It’s a different brown-haired woman, this one tall and slender; she stands against the window, having clearly chosen that option, while Rogers watches her undress. Barnes doesn’t have a directional mike but he remembers plenty. It makes his stomach curdle to imagine what’s happening in there—the words being said to someone else.

Someone not him.

It’s a stupid moment to have this realization, when maybe everything is falling apart and the woman in the window eases the straps of her dress down off her broad shoulders. Rogers is watching her with that predator gleam but there’s something about him that’s closed off. Like he has a door inside of him, too, that he’s keeping shut and locked. It’d opened that one night, when he’d slung his head over the sink and called out for Bucky in despair; Barnes thinks that must be the only time. Maybe the only time in Rogers’ whole life and fuck, fuck, he’s had this all wrong.

Then the woman straightens up and throws a knife into Rogers’ throat.

It happens so fast—too fast. Suddenly there’s a slim blade buried just above Rogers’ right collarbone. His hand goes to it, gripping the handle but not taking it out. His eyes are wide. He staggers backwards as the woman shoves away from the window. It cracks with the force of her movement.

Barnes moves, too—or his body does, anyway. His mind might be frozen but his body sends him hurtling across the air between the rooftop and Rogers’ kitchen window.

He’s lucky that she cracked it already; otherwise he might have simply bounced off and fallen to the street. As it is, he lands among shards that cut him even as he rolls onto one shoulder back to his feet.

The woman is over Rogers, who is fighting one-handed as he keeps his grip on the knife handle. If he takes it out—or _she_ takes it out—he’ll bleed to death, serum or no.

She spins to Barnes. Her brown wig is askew. Underneath her hair is platinum blonde and—

—and he _knows_ her—

—or his body does, because it flinches—

She smirks and says something that Barnes can’t hear—he put his earbuds back in automatically after he left the restaurant and Gerard Way is telling him that if he stays he’ll be forgiven.

When he whips up his gun and shoots her between the eyes, she looks strangely surprised. She dies with that expression on her face, falling to the floor beside Rogers, who is applying pressure around the knife and holding very still.

There’s blood pooling in the hollow of his throat and trickling down the side of his neck. He’s breathing slowly but steadily. The knife is narrow, but it’s buried at least an inch into his neck, right in the middle of the sternocleidomastoid muscle. There are nerves, vertebrae. Carotid artery. Jugular.

Rogers is looking up at him, his eyes wide and unblinking. They’re mostly pupil, with only a ring of bright blue around both.

Barnes rips his hoodie pocket in half to get at his phone and calls Clint.

Clint doesn’t answer. Barnes drops to his knees beside Rogers, fumbling between the phone and his need to apply something, a field dressing, anything to stop the leak of blood. He doesn’t want to use the metal hand, the pressure sensors aren’t perfect but the fingertips won’t work on the screen, either.

He calls Romanoff. No answer. Rogers starts trying to sit up and Barnes drops the phone on the floor to pin him down, metal hand pressed flat against his chest. _Stay the fuck still_ , he tries to say but his throat is tight and raw, and the words burn him like acid.

Rogers stays down. He looks at Barnes and says something. Barnes yanks the earbuds out in time to hear, “—in the bathroom.”

Barnes scrambles up—why are his knees so weak—to race into the bathroom, bouncing off of and cracking the doorjamb as he goes. The first-aid kit under the sink is small and efficient. He recognizes everything in it but his brain won’t tell him what to do so he brings everything out to Rogers, who points at a spray can of something. Barnes fumbles the top off and sprays some kind of foam around the edges of the wound. It clots instantly but there’s still so much blood and the knife is still—it’s too far in, it’s—

He calls 9-1-1.

“What’s your emergency?”

The scream in Barnes’ head is back. Everything in him is straining, his neck aching with muscles drawn tight: finally, a few words saw their way through. “Stabbed—knife throat. Knife in throat. Help.”

“Sir, has someone been stabbed in the throat?”

“ _Yes_. Fucking—” And something about the curseword batters down the levee; the rest comes flooding out. “Steve Rogers has been stabbed in the throat. Knife in situ. Attacker is down. Send medevac to 830 Carroll Street, Brooklyn, _now_. Now now.”

Rogers is trying to sit up again. Worse, he’s trying to speak. Barnes imagines that he can see the knife from the inside: a millimeter to the left or right of something vital, threatening death with each shift of muscle. He drops the phone and pins Rogers to the floor with both hands then curses again when Rogers _lets go_ of the knife and stops applying pressure to his neck in favor of reaching up to pull off the mask.

The 911 operator is talking. “—attacker? Sir? Sir?”

“Attacker is fucking _down_ ,” Barnes snaps. “Attacker was shot in the fucking _head_ , she’s dead, Captain Rogers is stabbed in the throat and is _not dead_ , get a—medic—” His brain jumps, gives him strange words. “Get fucking Morita—we need a medevac _now_. It’s _Steve_.”

The operator says something else, ambulance on the way, police. The words don’t make sense, there’s no police in—

Rogers is staring up at him. At Barnes. At his face, because Rogers pulled the mask off. He can see Barnes’ face, and suddenly there’s a kind of electric jolt in his head. They’re in Brooklyn. This is Brooklyn, Park Slope. Carroll Street. Who the fuck is Morita.

His face is bare and Rogers’ eyes are huge, fixed. His mouth works and Barnes tries to say, _Don’t try to talk_ , but his voice has dried up again. He’s straddling Rogers’ torso, his metal hand wrapped around the knife and his human fingers pressed against Rogers’ neck, holding back his blood.

Rogers doesn’t look like he even cares about the knife anymore. He touches Barnes’ jaw, just lightly with his fingertips, like Barnes is made of salt and will crumble at his touch. His fingers are sticky with his own blood. It feels like Barnes is the one running empty: the edges of his vision have gone dark and wavery and there’s a screeching in his ears.

 _I’m sorry_ , he mouths, empty and helpless. Rogers’ gaze is locked on his; his eyes are the only thing Barnes can see, as from a great distance. There's tears on Rogers' cheeks but they're not his. _I’m sorry_.

By the time the ambulance gets there Rogers is white as a sheet. He still struggles when Barnes pulls away, hand clamping down on his metal wrist and refusing to let go until they sedate him.

When his fingers go slack—with sedative, with sedative, not with death, _please_ —Barnes turns and dives out the window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Characters suffer PTSD, cope as best they can in occasionally unhealthy ways. Past drug addiction is mentioned. Canon-typical violence.


	8. You better run like the devil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Posting on the sketchiest wifi in a foreign land. I hope it all looks right because I doubt my ability to fix it.

One.

The blonde woman flashes in front of his eyes. Her mouth moves. He doesn’t understand what she’s saying.

One.

A jolt inside his brain. The huge, breathing thing is clawing at the inside of the door, trying to get out.

One.

One _what_? He doesn’t fucking _know,_ he can’t remember, he can’t remember—

One.

Barnes is crouched in an empty patient room. It’s currently doubling as storage for extra monitors and rapid transfusion machines. Outside, people move up and down the hallway. No one is running, but they move quickly. If he listens hard enough he can hear the doctors and nurses down the hall. They came and pulled one of the rapid transfusers a while back—completely failing to notice Barnes in the corner—and several hospital aides went running by with large Styrofoam containers stamped BLOOD BANK on the sides; but now things have calmed down.

The patient is stable, and sedated. They are waiting for OR.

One.

The blonde woman.

The blonde woman is one.

One what?

It goes around and around and around inside his head, pinging off every surface. He wants to stuff his ears full of music but he needs to listen for the room down the hall.

Then: “I need help! Multiple gunshot wounds to the abdomen.”

And: a too-familiar groan. “Aw, fuck.”

By the time he gets there Clint’s on a gurney, getting rolled into a room. He’s conscious and holding his own gut; his shirt is soaked through with blood. For a brief second his eyes lift and meet Barnes’ gaze, and then he is surrounded by medical personnel.

When she turns and spots him, Romanoff rears back in surprise then quickly gets hold of herself. “High-powered long-range shot, hit three times.”

Barnes’ voice has died again, but she knows sign. _Where? When? S-t-a-r-k?_

“No— _Stark_ is at the Tower. Apparently sometime in the last year he got paranoid enough to program his suit with a medevac _and_ build himself a private medical wing.”

_Who?_

Romanoff checks through the window of the room then moves away, out of the flow of bodies. Barnes follows and they wash up against the far wall. “Clint didn’t get a good look at him, he had Stark wrapped up. When he got hit Stark broke free and fought the shooter. Clint says it took a _tank missile_ to put him down, and he tore Stark up along the way.”

Two.

A jolt in his brain.

Romanoff is staring at him. “What’s two?”

He doesn’t know. Barnes is shaking again but manages to gesture over his shoulder. _Rogers_.

Her eyes widen and she follows him to the edge of the nurse’s desk. From there they can see diagonal across the ward. Only Rogers’ arm is visible through the window, but it’s an unmistakable arm.

Pale, Romanoff draws back. “Your turn.”

 _Female attacker, stabbed Rogers in the throat. She—knew me, somehow._ He waits while she absorbs that news then adds, _S-t-a-r-k said that someone in SHIELD told him where to find me. Wanted him to kill me. SHIELD compromised?_

Her lips press tight but she nods. “Clint’s phone was scrambled. So was mine. If we hadn’t set up an independent panic button between the two of us, I wouldn’t even have found him in time.”

For a moment they both hesitate as the emergency ward bustles around them—and then Romanoff pivots in place, scans the hallway, finds a single-occupancy restroom, and moves for it. Inside, they square up. The devil must be sledding: Barnes once told Clint it’d be a cold day in hell before he trusted Romanoff.

“Why were you in Rogers’ apartment?” Romanoff asks.

_Wasn’t. Was—surveillance._

“But you were there, in both cases. That points to HYDRA.”

_Agree. I think the woman tried to use an audible trigger on me. I had earbuds on, didn’t work._

Despite everything, she smirks. “Well, thank your stupid emo music for that.”

Despite everything, Barnes draws up short, glaring.

She waves it aside. “Did you know _her_?”

One.

Barnes smacks the side of his head. From her expression, Romanoff understands that gesture, too. “I don’t have a description of the shooter on the roof. I’d ask for one from Clint but he’s about to be rolled into surgery and I don’t think he got a good look anyways.”

_S-t-a-r-k._

“Also probably in surgery, at the top of his tower.”

He rolls that around in his head a moment. Down one end of the hall, Rogers is stabilized. They’re going to take him to the OR—or they were, before Clint rolled in. The two of them are vulnerable here, with only the hospital security to protect them; SHIELD might be no protection at all, right now.

Someone did this. Hit both Stark and Rogers at the same time—took down the two people who’d responded after the attack on Barnes in the café. They’d set Barnes up to get killed by Stark, or to kill Stark himself; when that hadn’t worked they’d gone after Rogers in order to draw him out. The blonde woman— _one_ , his completely unhelpful brain reminds him—had smiled when she saw him.

Which meant that this isn’t just about HYDRA. This is someone out to get _him_.

Finally he signs, _J-A-R-V-I-S._

-o-

They ride to Stark’s tower in Romanoff’s absurd fucking black Corvette.

“So,” Romanoff says almost casually as she inches her way towards Manhattan. With the public alert they could be here for hours, no matter that it’s midnight, but the NYPD has shut down several of the subway lines and Barnes doesn’t think he could handle the crush. “How long have you been running surveillance on Rogers?”

He doesn’t deign to reply, just goes on watching the side streets. She isn’t deterred in the slightest. “Because I seem to recall a few reports about sabotaged camera setups and leapfrogs getting tripped right into Rogers’ sightlines.”

“Wow,” Barnes says without really meaning to, then flinches in surprise to hear his own voice. Swallowing, he continues with his hands. _Sounds like your SSG units suck._  


She presses her lips together in a not-smirk then rebounds with, “Can I ask you a question? Which, you don’t have to answer. I kind of feel like if you don’t answer, though, you’re answering it anyw—”

_What._

“When we first met, you said your dick didn’t work. Was that a lie or did Rogers really give you your first hard-on since 2007?”

At least she did him the courtesy of not saying _since 1945_ ; still not much of a courtesy.

Sam tells Barnes frequently that his unblinking gaze is ‘unnerving.’ The Black Widow is made of sterner stuff because she blithely continues. “I’m just wondering if I need to brush up on my skills. Maybe Rogers can give me some tutorials.”

Barnes signs, his gestures sharp and vicious, _Ask Clint. He definitely tried to give me my first blowjob since 1945._ Romanoff loses a bit of her smugness, there, and Barnes turns away pointedly.

After a few moments of silence, though, she says low and thoughtful, “It woulda been nice, maybe. To pretend?”

They’re dipping down into the tunnel. Barnes wishes that she’d taken a different route: he hates the Brooklyn tunnel, all that water lurking overhead and too much like a basement. Like a bank vault, like any of the hundred places they probably kept him, according to the files. He doesn’t remember, but his body does.

But he is not just his body.

He looks at Romanoff. She’s watching the road ahead, but she catches his attention quickly and raises an eyebrow.

He asks with his hands and face, _What is he like?_

She does him another courtesy by not pretending to mistake his meaning. She’s spent more time with Rogers than any of them: Clint said they’re regularly paired on missions. “Lonely,” she says. “But lonely in the kind of way where he doesn’t know he is, because he doesn’t expect anything else. He thinks that’s just the way he’s supposed to be and he doesn’t understand why anyone else thinks differently.”

It’s honest and that’s the worst part. She could have said anything else but she’s saying _that_ , as a friend. As Rogers’ friend, and maybe as his, too. He thinks of Rogers, maybe waking up in a hospital behind them, alone and knowing for the first time in years that he shouldn’t _be_ alone.

-o-

They park a few blocks away and around a couple of corners. “Put this on,” Romanoff tells him, holding out a hand that’s covered with something black. When he makes a face at her, she rolls her eyes and smudges it under one of her own eyes. “It disrupts the camera recognition.”

When she holds out her hand again Barnes reluctantly swipes his fingers over hers and then smears the grease around his eyes.

They approach Stark Tower at a walk, their faces carefully tucked down and to the side, showing their marked features first. It shouldn’t work but there’s no one at the front desk and that’s unsettling enough: this place should be guarded at its entry levels like a fortress and it’s not, currently. When he glances sideways Romanoff lets him see how strange this is.

They walk right past the front desk and enter the elevator. “Override command whiskey-golf-delta-two-nine,” Romanoff says after the doors close behind them.

There’s a long pause, long enough that both their hands go towards their hidden weaponry before the elevator starts to rise.

“JARVIS?” Romanoff asks.

“Agent Romanoff,” a British voice answers. Warily.

“We’re not here to hurt Stark,” Romanoff clarifies. “We want to find out who did.”

The elevator slows to a halt. Barnes breaks out in a cold sweat. Too confined, too vulnerable. “How can I be of assistance?” JARVIS asks, no less polite or cautious.

“You record all of Stark’s time in the suit,” Barnes says, grinding the words out between his teeth. He sounds like a chainsmoker. He wants music, pressure in his ears blotting out anything else, but his earbuds stay in his pocket. “We need a v-visual on the shooter.”

The stutter makes him cringe but neither of them react. “What do you intend to do with this information?” JARVIS asks.

“We think someone might have compromised SHIELD and are doing their best to take out anyone that can stop them from whatever’s coming next.” Romanoff glances sideways at Barnes. “Intelligence suggests it might be a remnant of HYDRA. Agent Barnes needs a visual to confirm.”

‘Agent Barnes,’ as he’s ever been anything that far above-board. JARVIS is silent for a moment, probably running a billion different predictive models, before the screen that displays the floor number and the weather outside flickers.

He and Romanoff edge closer, watching as the image switches to the grainy, first-person POV that must be Stark’s view from his suit. Of course the first thing they see is Clint, standing over Stark; Clint, catching three rounds to the gut and tumbling to the ground. Romanoff doesn’t so much as twitch but Barnes can feel the rounds go through Clint, go through her. Go through him.

The image swings wildly for a moment, presumably as Stark worked to free himself from Clint’s net arrow, before it levels out. “Freeze,” Romanoff commands and they crowd closer.

The shooter’s a tall, thin man with ginger hair. He’s frozen in the middle of an advance—moving to engage Stark at close quarters, armed with some kind of escrima sticks that glow with a sinister energy. “Resume at half speed,” Romanoff says and he moves _wrong_ , too fast and too sleek. Barnes has seen video of himself, surveillance from crime scenes. Footage taken by support teams, recording his kills, for HYDRA to inspect and gloat over.

The shooter moves like he does, except _worse_. Every motion perfectly contained and efficient. The fight is fast, brutal, and nearly fatal to Stark. When they tumble from the roof to the street below the shooter gets right back up like the 100-foot fall was nothing. It’s only luck that Stark manages to leap away and fire a backup weapon. The shooter’s body disintegrates, blowing outward in pieces, and even then for a moment Barnes half-expects him to somehow reassemble and resume the attack.

 _Two_ , his brain says. “Two,” he says aloud.

Romanoff is looking at him. “The serum?”

“Yes.” He’s got no memories to back it up, but he _knows_.

“And the woman in Rogers’ apartment?”

He hadn’t been paying attention to her until she’d thrown the knife, but—“Yes. She broke the glass.”

“If they’ve replicated it—”

“Yes.” There could be dozens. Hundreds. One and two, and how many more? How many?

“JARVIS,” Romanoff says urgently, “you’ve got a direct emergency line to Director Fury, right? I need an open, secure channel, now.”

The screen has gone blank. There’s no answer.

A thrill goes up Barnes’ back. The screen flickers and there’s just for a second there’s something, a face, light _green_ —

“I—apologize,” JARVIS says, and his voice is sputtering, distorted. “I seem—to be—under attack. Please— _zzt_ —evacu— _zzt_ —safety—”

—and Barnes is clawing not for his weapon but for the earbuds, shoving them in even as the green face emerges from the blackness.

“Sergeant Barnes,” a voice says, but the accent has changed.

It’s the last thing he hears before he switches the music on, deafening loud. _SO WHY DON’T YOU BLOW ME A KISS BEFORE YOU GO_. Romanoff has her hand on her weapon and is standing away from him.

On the screen, Armin Zola smirks. Words appear on the screen, just below the glowing green orbs of Zola's spectacles. YOUR INSIPID POPULAR MUSIC WILL NOT SAVE YOU SERGEANT BARNES, but Barnes thinks, _Yeah. Yeah, it will_. His head feels strangely light, as if the sound and pressure in his ears has driven all the panic out through his nose or something. In its place, like a huge animal erupting from its concrete prison, rises his anger.

"Oh," he says aloud, and can barely hear his own voice, "it's THIS motherfucker."

It's as much for Romanoff's benefit as a taunt for Zola. When he glances sideways she meets his eye; whatever she sees there makes her relax. The hand on her weapon moves, making some hidden adjustment. The elevator has started to rise again.

Barnes refocuses on the screen. He doesn't remember Zola any more than he remembers Rogers or his family or himself; but he's read the files. He's seen the photographs of the smug little rat bastard standing next to the Winter Soldier, smirking at the camera. He knows enough. "I blew up your bunker four years ago. How are you here?"

More words appear in the screen. _WHILE YOUR INSOLENT ATTACK DAMAGED MY PRIMARY CORTICAL SYSTEMS I WAS ABLE TO_ \--the screen flickers-- _UPDO MY CONSCIOUSNESS ONTO SHIELD'S DIGITAL ARCHIVES. THERE I HAVE REMAINED EVER SINCE LIKE A BEAUTIFUL PARASI_ \--

Romanoff's mouth is moving. -- _sent the message to Stark from inside SHIELD?_

 _YOU ARE CORRECT FRAULINE. AND NOW I MUST THANK YOU FOR GRANTING ME ACCESS TO STARK TOWER_ \--the screen flickers again, sputtering blue before Zola's face returns; Barnes chances a quick look at Romanoff, who shakes her head, frowning-- _THROUGH DIRECTOR FURY'S BACKDOOR ACCESS AND FOR RETURNING MY PROPERTY TO ME._

"I'm not your fuckin' property," Barnes snarls. "I don't belong to anyone."

_I SEE YOUR DEFIANCE REMAINS. BUT IT WILL MOT SAVE YOU. WHILE YOU SCAMPERED AROUND DESTROYING BASES I WAS IN THE HEART OF SHIELD, BIDING MY TIME._

_That's impossible_ , Romanoff says. _Someone would have noticed you._

_OH BUT THEY HAVE. THE GREAT WEAKNESS OF OVERSIGHT FRAULINE IS THAT NO ONE COULD AGREE ON ACTION TO DESTROY ME. THEY HAVE ARGUED AND DEBATED AND NOW IT IS TOO LATE. I HAVE BEEN LICKING FORWARD TO THIS._

Licking? Beside him Barnes senses Romanoff's frown. He scans the words as they fade, wondering if there's some kind of hidden code, maybe a visual trigger; but if there is, it's not working on him. "Sorry, asshole. You're not getting me back."

_I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU. YOU WERE MERRRRRRELY A PROTOTYPE. THOSE WHO CAME AFTER YOU HAVE NONE OF YOUR FLAWS. THEY ARE PERFECTED._

Romanoff is moving very slightly, back and to the left of the elevator; Barnes can't see her face or hands and doesn't know if she's saying anything. They're still going upward. "I dunno, dickweed, from where I'm standing they don't look so hot. As in, they're cold and dead."

 _AH_ , says the screen, _BUT THERE ARE MO_ \--

It flickers, sputters blue and white and back to green. JARVIS, Barnes thinks, that's JARVIS fighting back. "Having problems, jackass?" he asks. "Looks like the digital age isn't being too kind."

 _SSSSS--SSSTARK'S WARCHDOG ISS PERSUSTANT. BUT IT ISSSS NO MAYTER. YOU ARE TOO LATE SERGEANT. THE PLAN IS_ \--zzt-- _ALREADY IN MOTION_.

Romanoff's hand touches Barnes' back, tapping Morse code. F-e-e-t-f-i-r-s-t.

The elevator has stopped moving. The screen is flickering almost constantly, now, as JARVIS and Zola duke it out on the cyber level.

"Don't suppose you feel like monologuing some more," Barnes suggests. "Wanna talk more about this evil plan? Details? Mission statement?"

The screen sparks. The elevator lights cut out.

Zola's face is a garbled mess, nothing but static. His voice is a distorted shriek that even Barnes can hear over The Sharpest Lives.

"WHAT HYDRA CANNOT RULE--"

The elevator lurches--

"--IT WILL DESTROY!"

\--and _drops_.

No, more than drops: its mechanisms _fling_ it downward fast enough that Barnes feels slightly weightless. Romanoff is on him, swinging herself up and over his shoulder; Barnes braces and shoves her upward as she jackknifes her body, striking feet-first against the elevator hatch. She goes through with enough force to arc up onto the roof of the elevator; by the time Barnes grabs the edge of the busted hatch and hauls himself up, she's righted herself and is pointing her weapon at the blur of concrete and steel walls whipping past them.

She fires: a grappling hook. It's not going to be enough, even if the cable has enough tensile strength to hold them, their combined weight and momentum will rip her arms from their sockets. Barnes lunges for her, clamping the metal fingers of his left hand around the cable just above the muzzle of her gun and wrapping the other around her shoulders. Romanoff is already turning into him, jumping up to wrap her legs around his waist.

The cable reaches the end of its short reel and they go hurtling sideways, slamming into the wall of the elevator shaft and rebounding. For a split second Barnes thinks the cable has improbably held--but then he feels it snap.

He flails as they resume falling, groping for a handhold that's just out of reach, but Romanoff is already twisting even as her legs stay locked around him. Romanoff has a secondary, because of course she does, which she fires into the opposite wall.

They swing down and again slam against the side of the shaft as one tangled unit. This time the cable holds, and Barnes immediately punches his metal fist into the wall to take the weight off Romanoff's arms.

Several dozen floors down there's a huge crush of metal as the elevator hits bottom. The shockwave blows past them in a rush of air.

For a moment they hang in place, panting. _Give me a shot to remember_ , Barnes' earbuds command.

When he lifts his head Romanoff meets his gaze. "You're a lot heavier than you look," she says.

Part of Barnes wants to rip the metal fist out of the wall and wave it at her. The part that doesn't want to complete their plummet down the shaft merely rolls its eyes and starts looking for a foothold.


	9. B-side: You can sleep in a coffin/But the past ain’t through with you

Sharon isn’t having a good night.

There’s a lot of chatter on the radio but nothing conclusive. Captain Rogers is in the hospital following an attack; Agent Barton is in the same hospital, not from the same attack. Something is happening at Stark Tower, but after six years of cooperation—albeit mostly to avoid the same suspicion directed at his father—Stark has lately slammed shut all channels of communication.

It’s all obviously connected but no one seems to know _how_.

Sharon paces around the house as she listens. She does her goddamn job, she checks all the sightlines out of the house and makes regular status reports, but she also puts in a load of laundry, cooks and freezes several portions of the only meal she really knows how to cook—a basic stew with vegetables and chicken—and reorganizes her portable weapons cabinet.

All the while, abrupt and uninformative reports pour in. Rogers is still at the hospital. Barton is out of surgery, into recovery. Nothing to report. Nothing to report. Nothing to report.

Groaning audibly, Sharon sits down hard at the table and spreads her hands across its surface. Okay. Think. _If you don’t know something_ , Aunt Peggy had told her once, _then guess and work backwards from there._

Guess one: someone is attacking the Avengers, in retaliation for something. Loki? Whoever actually leads the Chitauri? A personal enemy of Stark’s?

Problem one: Barton was admitted to the hospital with multiple burns that are consistent with Stark’s non-lethal repulsor rounds.

Guess two: the Avengers are attacking each other, due to some kind of internal power struggle or under the influence of some alien device, similar to what happened on the helicarrier.

Problem two: who the hell attacked Stark? Rogers would have a hard time beating Stark in the suit, and he was across town with a knife in his throat. According to all intel, Thor is off-world and Banner—while he could definitely have won that fight—would have made a hell of a lot more mess.

Guess three: this is a pre-emptive strike, designed to distract, confuse, and disable their intelligence and defense apparatus, in preparation for a larger operation.

Problem three: _what larger fucking operation?_ What’s bigger than this?

“Agent 13,” a female voice says behind her. “Please keep your hands on the table.”

Sharon freezes; she knows that voice. Sure enough, Natasha Romanoff enters her peripheral vision and rounds to face her, staying on the edge of the room. She looks rough: covered in dust, her hair tangled, a scrape on her jaw.

Romanoff smiles apologetically. “Sorry. Just need to be sure we don’t have uninvited guests.”

“Who’s we?” Sharon asks. She has a gun strapped to her ankle. If guess number two is right, which side is Romanoff on?

Romanoff glances sideways and shit.

Shit. Shit.

She’s seen him before, but never without the mask on. Underneath, he’s maybe 30, with dyed black hair that shows brown roots, high cheekbones, and dead, dead eyes. He’s standing in the doorway, covered in the same kind of dust as Romanoff and watching Sharon with a steadiness that says he knows about the gun on her ankle and he knows exactly how fast she can draw it and _it will not be fast enough_.

“Agent 13,” Romanoff says. Sharon looks over at her then jerks her gaze back to the Winter Soldier, like if she keeps looking at him he won’t be able to move. “We need a sitrep.”

“Sitrep.” There’s moisture building up between Sharon’s splayed fingers on the tabletop. She can feel it starting to bead. If her hand twitches involuntarily will they take that as a sign of aggression? “There’s no sitrep. Director Fury initiated Deep Shadow Protocol, he’s gone dark. We’re holding positions, keeping radio communication to a minimum, and staying on high alert. No one knows anything.”

“But you always know more than you should, don’t you,” Romanoff prompts. “You’re not high-ranking but Fury always puts you somewhere important. Why is that, Agent 13?”

Sharon looks at her, then at the Soldier. Makes herself look him in the eye. “Because Peggy Carter is my aunt.”

If that means anything to him, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t even blink. It’s like there’s no one even home, which raises a whole new frightening possibility.

“And the last thing Fury wants is to have another Carter die on his watch,” Romanoff murmurs in the voice of someone who’s both pleased to have a puzzle solved and irritated that she didn’t get there on her own. She moves slightly and when Sharon darts her eyes over, Romanoff is—she’s signing something to the Winter Soldier? Who reaches up and—takes a pair of earbuds out. They’re playing some kind of music, incongruously up-tempo and… _bouncy_.

“So, Agent Carter.” Romanoff smiles again. “What’s the sitrep?”

Sharon swallows. The indicators of untruthfulness include: a delay in response (which she’s doing right now), hand-to-face activity, change in vocal intonations, glancing to the right, excessive details. If she tells the truth, will they believe her? Or will they assume that she’s avoiding the common indicators in accordance with training? If she lies, will they catch it?

There’s a clock on the wall. The second hand is at fourteen minutes past the hour.

She says, “Agent Barton is out of surgery. Critical but stable condition.” Romanoff’s smile dims and becomes something more real. Sharon transfers her gaze to the Winter Soldier. “Agent Rogers was upgraded from serious to fair half an hour ago.”

That, finally makes his expression flicker. “Guards at the hospital?” he asks. His voice is so much lighter than she expects, younger than his face looks.

“There’s a seven-man team on the perimeter, another one inside. Once they’re stabilized orders are to move them to SHIELD HQ.”

“SHIELD may be compromised,” Romanoff interjects. “Or they _want_ us to think that SHIELD is compromised. Either way, Clint and Steve are safer in place, so long as we can get someone we trust on their doors.” 

“Who’s _they_?” Sharon asks, just as the walkie-talkie crackles with another non-report. She looks between them, but neither answer. “Listen, we’ve all been sitting here all night with no _idea_ what’s happening, I have nothing on sitrep. Stark is in shutdown, Barton and Rogers are in intensive care, we’re all on the highest alert possible. What is going _on_ —?”

She cuts off as Romanoff signs something fast and hard to the Soldier. She’s given something away. What the fuck did she give—the Soldier is melting back into the kitchen. _Shit shit shit_.

“Deep Shadow protocol means that Fury named an acting Director before he went dark,” Romanoff says like nothing has happened. “Who’s the acting Director?”

“Maria Hill.”

“Hill.” Romanoff frowns. “Not Coulson?”

“No. I don’t know why.”

“What were Fury’s last known whereabouts?” When Sharon hesitates, Romanoff leans forward. “Agent. You can either trust me or not. This will go faster if you do. But either way, it _will go_.”

Sharon swallows. “There was something happening in Virginia. I don’t know what.”

Romanoff’s mouth twists. “Then what _do_ you know, Agent Carter?”

The clock on the wall says seventeen minutes past the hour. Sharon takes a deep breath and says, “I know I’m not the one you need to talk to.”

Almost immediately after she speaks, there’s the sound of the back door getting kicked in. Or elbowed in, as the case may be.

“Don’t shoot!” Sharon yelps, putting her hands up in the air. Romanoff has her gun out and aimed at Sharon. “Don’t shoot, that’s Falcon.”

“Carter?” a voice calls from the back of the house. Where the fuck is the Soldier, oh god.

“In here! Drop your weapon, don’t shoot. Nobody shoot!”

“Who’s nobody?” Sam Wilson demands as he hobbles around the corner into the dining room. Romanoff lifts both her eyebrows at him, cool as anything, and keeps her weapon trained on Sharon.

“Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot him,” Sharon chants desperately.

“Don’t shoot _who_ ,” Wilson asks, exasperated, just as the Soldier melts back into existence right behind him, a gun to his head.

 Wilson freezes with his face half-turned. He must be just barely able to see the Soldier in the corner of his eye. The gun goes slack in his hand. “Hey man,” he says softly. "I can explain.”

 


	10. Just sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for some fucked-up shit, including above-canon gore. Click notes for more trigger warnings.

They don’t actually get around to the explaining part for a while. First they have to drop Carter Jr. off at the hospital to watch the watchers. Then they steal a helicopter from the roof of the hospital.

Billions of dollars in funding for SHIELD and they have to steal their own ride. Apparently the Super-Secret Shadow Bullshit Protocol means that they need to maintain radio silence and keep their movements secret even from other SHIELD agents, so they can’t just _call_ for a ride like normal human beings with high-profile government access.

When they’re finally in the air, heading south—towards what, they don’t know: Fury is in Virginia somewhere but Hill has summoned them to DC—Barnes speaks into the microphone of his headset. “So you’re SHIELD.”

“ _No_ ,” Sam says adamantly over the comms; it’s strange to see his mouth move and hear this weird, tinny voice in the headset. Barnes’ fingers itch to stuff in his earbuds.

They’re in the back of the chopper; Romanoff’s at the controls. Barnes is in the aft seat, with Sam across from him. “I’m kind of an independent contractor,” Sam tells him. “Like you.”

Barnes doesn’t know what his face looks like or how well Sam can even see it in the dark but it must not be good, because Sam leans forward with an urgent expression. “Look, when the whole thing with Pierce and HYDRA went down, there was some street fighting in DC. I got caught up in it—nothing major, just trying to protect people that needed protecting. It got on the news, lasted a couple of media cycles.”

Barnes remembers that from back when he was first researching the VA for a possible therapist. It’d been a big part of the reason that he’d picked Sam.

Sam spreads his hands. “Fury heard about me. He needed people he knew he could trust—a network outside of SHIELD, outside of Congressional oversight, in case anything like that went down again. Which, I’m guessing it is, right now.”

Barnes digests that. “So you work for Fury.”

“I work for the goddamn New York City branch of Veteran’s Affairs. That’s what Fury asked me to do—I wanted to get the hell outta DC, and he said there was somebody up here, a vet, who needed help from a counselor who was one-hundred-percent _definitely_ not HYDRA. That was it, all I got. I _never_ reported to him about you, man. Not one word, on my grandma’s grave.”

Barnes sits back, pointedly looking out the window. It’s not that he doesn’t believe Sam; he’s done enough surveillance on him to be very fucking sure that Sam wasn’t sharing therapy notes or any other intel with a third party.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t unsettled by this revelation, on top of currently traveling inside a mobile flight apparatus that he _isn’t_ controlling, after having spent the last six hours in the constant company of other fucking human beings, _just prior to which_ he saw his—Steve get stabbed in the neck.

His ability to cope and not just start hitting things is wearing dangerously thin.

There’s an awkward pause in which Sam visibly struggles with the desire to further plead his case but evidently decides to give Barnes his space. Then Romanoff says into the headset, “So, either of you fellas know how to land this thing? The only time I’ve flown one, I kinda crashed.”

-o-

The sky is just starting to lighten with dawn when they land in a wildlife refuge to the northeast of the DC city limits. A bunch of deer break for cover as Barnes brings the chopper down in an open area, but other than that it seems uninhabited.

Against the treeline there’s a long, low building, obviously built in colonial times. When they exit the chopper, Romanoff taking Wilson’s arm across her shoulders to help him walk, two figures dressed in black steps out of the building.

Fury doesn’t move to meet them; behind him and to the left—his blind side—Hill is a thin black ghost. They wait as Romanoff and Wilson make their slow way over, Barnes bringing up the rear. At first it seems like a dick move; but close up, Barnes can see the sling around Fury’s right arm, the swelling on his cheekbone and eye socket, the flakes of dried blood under his left nostril.

When they’re a few feet away, Fury says, “Agent down.”

It’s Romanoff’s turn to stumble and she almost takes Wilson down with her when she does. “Sir,” she says, her voice low. Nothing else, but the plea is there: _no no don’t say it_.

Fury’s mouth is a hard line. “Pulled Coulson out myself. Couldn’t save him.”

Barnes sucks a breath in through his teeth. It’s just loud enough for Romanoff to turn her head; their eyes meet and they silently agree: _Oh fuck, no,_ Clint.

Then Hill is stepping over to take Wilson’s arm and Fury is turning back into the building. Romanoff and Barnes fall into step with him. “Six hours ago we had an alert at a nuclear missile silo in Virginia,” Fury explains. “The Air Force reported a security breach, then the line went dead. SHIELD scrambled three emergency strike teams; Coulson led them onsite himself. They got us some visuals.”

He hands a tablet to Romanoff. Barnes, walking behind, steps up to her shoulder. It’s just snapshots: a military facility, dead bodies in a hallway, dead bodies in another hallway, a smashed control center, and then—

Then—

Then—

“Five,” he says.

He’s stopped walking. Romanoff and Fury have both turned towards him. They must have walked a little further than him before he spoke. He doesn’t remember it, the seconds between his voice and their turn.

 _Five_.

The woman in Rogers’ apartment. The red-haired man, attacking Stark. The dark-skinned man in the digital photo that he just saw over Romanoff’s shoulder.

One.

Two.

Three.

“There are five,” he says and there is an earthquake in his mind. It’s all there: everything behind the locked door. There’s too much—five, there are five, HYDRA death squad, he trained them, the facility in Sibera—it’s a wave crashing over him, drowning him, he can’t _breathe_ —the chair, the tank, his arm strapped down, upgrades, a handsome blond man coming into the facility and smiling at him, _dawn of a new century_ , their apartment in Red Hook, the boniest part of Steve’s bony elbow pressing down on his throat, _the chair_ —

A steady beep.

_Now come one, come all, to this tragic affair, wipe off that makeup what’s in is despair—_

He’s crouched on the floor, in an old building in a wildlife refuge northeast of Washington, DC. Romanoff is crouched in front of him, her hands outstretched. She is holding—she has a pair of earbuds. His earbuds. She is holding them to his ears, so that he can hear the music. His music.

Barnes sucks in a breath that feels raw on his throat. Has he been yelling?

He rises and Romanoff comes with him, pressing the earbuds on him until he makes a face and pushes her away. Fury’s a couple of steps beyond her shoulder, one hand on his sidearm and the other still holding the tablet. It still displays the blurred, grainy image of a dark-skinned man sighting down a grenade launcher.

Barnes knows him. Knows his _name_. But it’s one piece in a trembling, haphazard pile; if he pulls it out, the whole thing might collapse—the whole thing being _him_.

His face tingles and he licks his lips just to make sure he can still feel it. “So they’ve got a nuke,” he prompts.

“Who’s _they_?” Fury demands.

Way too many words for Barnes to fumble through, so he gestures at Romanoff. In as few words as possible she outlines their night so far; when she’s done Fury returns his one-eyed gaze to Barnes. “Five supersoldiers?”

The wavering structure inside his head gives a shudder; Barnes does his best not to start shrieking. God knows what his fucking face is doing. The edges of his vision have started to flicker, like his whole reality is the page of a magazine that he could peel back and see—what? 1924? ‘43? HYDRA or Steve Rogers or his family or the dead?

“Five,” he confirms with more effort than he knew he still had in him. “And, apparently, a nuke.”

They enter the drafty long hall of the building and descending straight down a staircase into an underground intelligence bunker. It’s cramped, obviously an outpost that hasn’t seen much use. There are no computers here, just paper and maps and cheap radios. A couple dozen people hurry this way and that, ants scurrying through their tunnels.

“You took rathole kinda literally,” Barnes says. He’s still unsteady, adrenaline making his body shake like the aftermath of an assault.

Fury snorts. “Oversight committee wanted access to all our wired bases, but they never bothered with anything non-digitized. We’ve had to go old school.”

They step into a rectangular room that has a giant map of the US spread out over one wall, with actual pins and dots sticking in it. A whole edge of reality peels back a moment and Barnes sees terrain markers, miniature Allied and Nazi flags, a gloved hand tracing the line of advanced battalions, before he can shove the fluttering edge back down again.

“—narrow down targets,” Fury is saying.

“Something big,” Romanoff answers. “Either Zola _seriously_ underestimated Stark’s AI, or he fully expected to die. He wouldn’t have done that for anything small.”

“There’s aren’t many _small_ cities on the Eastern seaboard, agent,” Fury says heavily.

“Washington’s the better target—but New York City would be personal, that’s where the Valkyrie was heading. Either way, if they could make it look like Russia, or China, that might trigger counter-strikes.”

“That’s not,” Barnes starts then stops and shakes his head sharply, like he can rattle the information loose. It’s all too shaky, ready to tumble, but he gets out: “They didn’t want America, they wanted the _world_. There’s something bigger, something—”

“Sir,” Romanoff cuts in, her tone stridently, absolutely calm. “Whatever happened to the staff we recovered from Loki?”

There’s a brief, awful pause. Barnes had only held the staff a few moments, but he’d felt the buzz of its power, contained and distilled. A supernova in a ball the size of his fist.

And if that supernova was somehow unleashed…

“It was turned over to a research team,” Fury answers slowly. “The UN’s been after it ever since—once the World Security Council disbanded they started trying to get control of the Avengers, our science division, all of it. Last week the Secretary of State signed a treaty giving them limited jurisdiction over any alien technology that presented a threat to the entire planet.”

“The staff,” Romanoff guesses.

Fury gives her a grim nod. “It was officially turned over two days ago. UN special envoy is taking custody today, flying it to Luxemburg.”

After that things start moving very quickly.

They agree that warning the UN envoy is out: even if they were able to get the staff to a more secure location in time, that’d still leave the HYDRA supersquad in possession of a nuke and an abundance of targets that, while not world-ending, would still result in the deaths of millions. As part of Deep Bullshit Protocol, SHIELD has scrambled all communication lines to the joint task force which oversees their work; but bureaucracy never moves fast and they have maybe another eight, nine hours before the full weight of the US military-industrial-intelligence complex comes down on their heads. The staff leaves for Luxemburg in six hours.

Sam comes back with a kind of advanced soft cast on his leg; he and Barnes have a brief, tense argument that Sam ends with, “I’d rather die fighting then get vaporized outta nowhere, man. It’s not your call.”

At least they have wings for him. They have backup gear for Barnes, too, and the Avengers. He stalls out in the middle of pulling on a tac vest. The Captain America suit is right there, upright on a headless mannequin. It’s not the bright, garish one that he wore during the Battle of New York; this one is dark blue, subdued, yet with a single white star on the chest: unmistakable.

He thinks of Rogers on his back on the floor, his blood smeared on Barnes’ hands and still more bubbling from around the edges of the blade. Would Barnes have been on the other side of the knife, if things had gone differently? If Rogers had been found sooner—or if Barnes had never escaped. Zola would have loved the irony.

He thinks of Rogers, alone in his apartment in an unfamiliar world, turning to strangers for comfort, and his throat closes up. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I had it all wrong._

The tac vest thuds to the floor when he drops it. Romanoff gives him a quick side glance then straightens sharply when he crosses to the blue tactical uniform, pulls it from the mannequin, and rips off the left sleeve. She doesn’t try to stop him, though.

Sam is upstairs already, his uniform consisting of basic body armor, a pair of guns, and his wings. He does a double-take when he sees Barnes coming up in the Cap uniform, shield in one hand and a sticky-grenade launcher in the other. “Dude,” Sam says. Barnes can practically _see_ the therapist in him recoiling in horror, spitting out phrases like _identity crisis_ and _sublimation of the self_.

Yes, Barnes knows what those phrases mean. Barnes has read self-help books; Barnes has read _all_ the self-help books.

A jerk of his chin pushes aside Sam’s unspoken concerns for his mental health. If they live through this, Barnes fully expects a breakdown to be waiting for him on the other side—for them both, probably.

But hey, apparently it’s this or get unexpectedly vaporized along with the rest of the Earth.

They take the stolen helicopter; Life Flight will be less conspicuous than a whatever Fury has in a hanger underneath the refuge pond. Romanoff goes with the ground crew that will move to secure the staff and evacuate the airport once engagement begins; Barnes is airborne with Sam, Fury, and Hill, who attempts to press an earwig into his hand.

Opening his fingers, he lets it drop. She looks at him sharply. Something about the expression and her hair makes him think she should have red lips and Victory Rolls; it’s disorienting enough that when the chopper lurches off the ground he feels for a second like his brain has disconnect, is floating out there in space and time, falling, falling—until he jerks back as though from the edge of sleep. Sam is saying something to Hill, maybe an explanation. Barnes turns his face away towards the open door, his eyes watering in the open wind that howls against his eardrums, blocking out their words.

Thick tree cover gives way to circular highways that ring the city, spiraling inward. They skirt the city limits. There’s chatter on the comms, but judging from Sam’s expression it’s nothing to worry about yet.

He meets Barnes’ gaze steadily from across the helicopter’s cabin. There’s hair blowing in Barnes’ face and after a moment he gathers as much of it back with one hand as he can then shoves the cowl down into place.

-o-

Josef is ready. As are the others, but if it were necessary he could kill them and complete the objective alone. If he were not ready, they would each of them kill him and complete the objective alone.

They are traveling in three separate vehicles, moving at a swift and steady pace along the Interstate 270. It is not unusual for three black SUVs to travel this route so close to the capital, and so they are ignored. They have reached Arlington; approximately 4.33 kilometers to target.

Abioye reports that the device has a blast radius of approximately 1.5 kilometers. However, their objective is to locate primary detonation as close to the target as possible.

They expect pursuit. There is no need to communicate between the vehicles; each of them know what to do.

They turn south along the cemetery. There is traffic here; Josef’s gaze sharpens, but it doesn’t appear to be anything unusual. He turns onto side streets. Abioye and Li Jie follow. Their progress is slowed. There are many cross streets but also many potential civilian casualties. They come to a stop and a crowd of people cross to one side of the street; another crosses to the other side. Josef watches them come and go with disinterest.

Then the crowds clear and

Captain America is standing in the middle of the street.

For a split second, Josef hesitates. Nadia could not have failed—

Captain America lifts one arm and fires his weapon. The morning sun glints off the metal of his arm.

Even as the sticky grenade skips along the pavement, Josef smiles.

-o-

The first SUV swerves left, striking a few people still on the crosswalk. Their bodies pinwheel.

The grenade attaches itself to the undercarriage of the second vehicle and detonates.

It rises upward and sideways, but the main frame of the vehicle is armored, so it lands on the median divider in one piece before tipping slowly into the opposite lanes of traffic.

 _So say now suffer all the children_ , his music tells him, _and walk away a savior_.

Swinging the EMP bomb down from his back, Barnes drops to one knee, slamming it into the ground. The blast knocks him back a few steps and his left arm makes a terrible noise as it shorts out. He’s already secured it underneath the shield, the magnetic anchor points attached to his shoulder and wrist like a makeshift sling.

Around him, the traffic lights go blank. The first and third SUVs are still functional but wherever the nuke is, the detonation mechanism is hopefully fried.

The third SUV reverses, plowing into the vehicles behind it and forcing them backward. A quick flash of light overhead tells him that Sam—who’d gone high to avoid the EMP—is swooping down in pursuit.

The first vehicle swings around, its grill aimed at Barnes.

He drops into a crouch, watching it come, then leaps upward when it gets close, catching the edge of the windshield and slamming down onto the roof with the shield underneath him. Bullets immediately strike its surface as the driver fires through the roof, but it protects his chest and belly.

Rocking up onto his knees, Barnes grits his teeth and punches his flesh hand downward through the windshield. He feels something crack but it’s not enough to disable him and he gets a grip on the steering wheel, wrenching it upwards.

It rips out of the steering column but stops only partway in the driver’s grip. Then he is being yanked forward, flipped off the vehicle to ricochet hard off the glass of a bus stop.

For a moment he’s stunned and vulnerable, with the tires of the SUV headed straight for him—and then a truck, a civilian vehicle passing through the intersection, T-bones the SUV.

_For the good guys and the bad guys, for the monsters that I bear._

The truck hits the driver’s side. Heaving upright with a quick shake of his head, Barnes runs for the passenger side of the SUV. His metal arm is regaining function, like mechanical pins and needles; they don’t have long.

He rips off the back door of the vehicle. The interior has been converted into a mobile assault station, with the seats ripped out and various weapons strapped to the ceiling, walls, and floor. In the middle of it all is a square black crate. Barnes lunges halfway into the car, ripping the lid off—but inside there’s nothing.

He’s just going to pull his walkie-talkie—his one concession to communication—when something closes around his ankle and yanks him bodily out of the SUV.

-o-

He’s here. It’s really him.

Josef is so pleased.

He swings Kolya—or the man they called Kolya—around easily, smashing him bodily into the side of a parked car. Reversing the swing, he takes Kolya’s ankle in both hands and brings him down against the side of the SUV. It’s a move that would break the back of a normal man, and has.

Kolya, though, Kolya merely catches himself with one foot, shoves off, and swings the borrowed shield at Josef’s head.

Josef barely dodges, releasing his hold on Kolya’s foot in order to avoid being decapitated. There’s a moment as they both regain their footing, and Josef spits, “желание.”

Kolya’s only response is to whip out an automatic rifle.

-o-

_And through it all, how could you cry for me? ‘Cause I don’t feel bad about it._

They trade blows and bullets, each equally armed. The driver—his name, his name, Barnes knows his _name_ —is faster than him and better armed, but Barnes has backup. The SHIELD agents keep their distance but keep zinging him with bullets, forcing him to break for cover instead of simply coming at Barnes full-throttle.

Tactically, he’s vastly outnumbered. It would make more sense for him to withdraw, attempt to rejoin the other two and find the nuke. But he keeps coming, his attention focused on Barnes.

In a quick break provided by SHIELD covering fire, Barnes scans the shooters and finds Hill. “Alpha’s empty!” he shouts. He can barely hear his own voice over the roar of his music. “Get to Bravo or Charlie, I’ve got him!”

No sooner has he said that then Josef— _Josef_ —is in front of him again, a wicked curved dagger in hand.

-o-

The mission imperative rises up to claw at him. SHIELD is here, they are in pursuit of the weapon, he must assist Abioye. Comply.

It passes over him. Zola, HYDRA, they were all so weak. Josef bares his teeth in a grin and spins, landing a boot in Kolya’s belly and sending him lurching backwards a few steps.

Kolya is here. But he wears that absurd costume and carries that borrowed weapon—and he is not responding to the trigger words.

He will. Kolya is weak. Was made to be weak and imperfect and broken.

Josef was made to break.

-o-

Josef throws him through a plate glass window into a café. Barnes rolls with the throw and keeps going, hurdling tables and counters to draw Josef out the other side onto the street, away from civilians and the rest of the fighting. Over the music he can hear distant gunfire.

He’s bleeding from a gash to the gut. A bullet’s lodged in his flesh arm; he switches the shield to that side, his metal arm having regained full capacity. Are his ribs broken or just bruised. Is the hot, liquid feeling on the back of his head sweat or blood.

How the fuck does someone fight in this suit.

Then Josef is in front of him, grinning as he swings his limbs into attack, grinning even as Barnes’ metal fist cracks his collarbone. It’s as if he’s lost all focus on the mission in favor of plowing relentlessly after Barnes.

There is a reason. It’s on the tip of Barnes’ brain, along with the rest of his eighty years of existence. Teetering.

-o-

It’s the shield that trips Kolya up, finally. He doesn’t know how to use it properly—foolish of him to try.

Josef catches it with one hand and twists it up and around, popping the shoulder out of the socket. Kolya screams in pain and Josef spins so that they are back-to-back, reaches over his shoulder to loop one hand under Kolya’s jaw, and _heaves_.

The cowl comes off in his hand, as does one wireless earbud. It’s still playing some kind of music. _The hardest part, the awful things that I’ve seen._

To his credit, Kolya rolls again and comes up on his feet, turns to face him even with his face bared and his right arm hanging loose.

So Josef has the pleasure of seeing his eyes when he says again, “желание.”

 

-o-

 

“ржавый,” Josef says. _Rusted._

Something rockets through Barnes, an instinctive terror. No no no, he has to—should he fight, should he get away?

 _Just sleep_ , the music in his remaining earbud tells him.

He chooses to fight, lunging for Josef’s throat even as it spits out, “семнадцать.” _Seventeen._

There is something coming, something terrible, and he can’t even see it, doesn’t even understand why his limbs are shaking, why his skin has gone cold and goose-dimpled. Every word is like a bell being rung inside of him that makes his very foundations shake.

 _Just sleep_.

“рассвет. печь.”

He strikes at Josef’s face wildly, desperate to stop the noise, the words, the way they wash his mind blank with panic. And bubbling up through the blind terror is the knowledge that he’s heard these words before: a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times, and all that came before and after.

“девять,” Josef says, and he is grinning again.

Barnes rears away from him, slapping his hand over his exposed ear—why didn’t he think to cover his ear from the beginning?—and for a split second there is only the music.

_Just sleep._

No, he is awake. He can hear the music. It was the first thing he ever heard. He is alive. He is being ripped in two, between the him that was and the him that is.

A hand closes around his throat and lifts him up. For an instant he is floating, free, and then he slams to the pavement with Josef on top of him, straddling his chest.

Josef looks directly into his eyes, wild with intent, like he wants to open his jaw and swallow Barnes whole. He says, rapid and relentless, “доброкачественный. возвращение на родину.”

He can’t breathe. Josef’s hand is around his throat, Josef’s weight is on his chest, he can’t breathe. His arm won’t move. He is shaking too bad to fight. Why can’t he move his arm.

 _Just sleep_.

“Один.”

The world is shaking, as if the bomb has gone off already and they’re both about to be blown to ash—but no, they’re not. The shaking is inside Barnes: a fissure opening up. It wants to swallow him. He’ll fall. He can feel it already—the memory. The beginning.

_Just sleep._

Josef says, “грузовой вагон.”

No. _No_.

_Just sleep._

No.

Josef has let go of his throat, is leaning down as if he really does mean to open his mouth and devour his prey.

So Barnes opens his mouth, lunges up, and sinks his teeth into the side of Josef’s neck.

He can feel it against his tongue when Josef screams. His fist lands against the side of Barnes’ head once, twice, three times. Blood floods Barnes’ mouth and skin peels under his teeth, coming away in a huge chunk when Josef seizes his head and forcibly shoves him away.

The music is a wordless scream in Barnes’ ear and Barnes mimics the sound as he heaves Josef’s hunched weight off of him, kips to his feet, and dives back down with all of _his_ bodyweight driven behind the edge of the shield.

Josef catches it at the last second, but only with one hand; the other stays instinctively clapped to the gushing hole in the side of his neck. One human hand is not enough to stop Barnes’ momentum and it goes on, goes down through skin and sinew and nerve and bone until it hits pavement.

For a moment they hang there, Barnes slumped against the rounded edge of the shield, panting, and Josef, wide-eyed and staring upward.

Then, slowly and with a slick noise, Josef’s head detaches from the surface of the shield and rolls backward across the center line of the street.

Barnes looks away from both Josef and the fissure inside of him. He can feel it closing up, swallowing all that he was—all that he might have been, if he had allowed himself to remember. It swallows up his memories and closes, a hard seal that he cannot bring himself to regret. Maybe he will, one day; maybe soon. But not now.

Now, he is alive. He is awake, and he hears the music.

_And I can’t, I can never wake up._

Rising, he grips the straps of the shield in his metal hand and yanks it out of the pavement, then turns and walks away down the street.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky rips a bad guy's throat out with his teeth and then decapitates him with the shield.


	11. B-side: C’mon angel, don’t you cry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took me so long to update--the political situation in my country really knocked me for a loop over the winter. This is a short interlude for now but the longer chapter that (I hope) a lot of people have been waiting for will follow soon. Trigger warnings at end.

Sam’s leg hurts like a motherfucker. The soft cast kept him upright through two hard landings and one instance in which he’d had to use his legs as blunt instruments, swinging them at a super-soldier’s head; but now his entire thigh is throbbing, scarred muscles bursting with fresh inflammation.

It’s 1300 and there is already Youtube video of Romanoff commandeering a construction crane and single-handedly dumping the staff’s container into the Potomac to protect it from a potential shockwave. Sam wants an ice pack, some Ibuprofen, and a horizontal surface.

Instead he’s limping his way across a hanger full of SHIELD personnel. There are also a few pissed-off UN officials surrounding Nick Fury, demanding explanations in high voices and casting nervous looks over their shoulders.

Sam follows the direction of their flitting glances and finds who he’s looking for. Barnes is…well, he’s looked better. He’s standing apart from everyone, and even the milling SHIELD techs seem to be giving him a wide berth.

That might have something to do with the coat of fresh blood smeared over his face and down onto the front of the Captain America uniform, or the separate coat of blood covering the shield that hangs slack from his arm.

At least most of the blood doesn’t appear to be his. Sam clocks a laceration on his side, a deeper wound in his right leg, and a broken nose, all of which are steadily but slowly oozing; with anyone else, Sam would add a probable concussion to the list, but it’s hard to say whether the distant look in his eyes is due to brain hemorrhage, dissociation, or some other fun bullshit.

Steeling himself to counsel another traumatized combat vet—and _Christ_ , for once he wants to be on the other fucking end of this—Sam hobbles over to stand directly in front of Barnes. He makes eye contact right away, which is good? Probably?

“Hey man,” Sam greets.

“Hey,” Barnes says. “Why are you standing up?”

It’s such a calm, reasonable question in such a calm, reasonable tone of voice, asked out of a blood-drenched mouth. Sam’s pretty sure he can see pieces of skin stuck between Barnes’ teeth.

“Thought you might need a medic,” Sam says, gesturing at Barnes’ wounds with the water bottle before holding it out. “Here.”

Barnes takes the water and starts to drink it automatically, then either inhales wrong or realizes that he really does have skin between his teeth and gags. The water kind of explodes everywhere and he doubles over, hacking and holding his side.

“Whoa, okay. Okay.” They’ve drawn some eyes, which probably isn’t the best: Sam has no idea where Barnes stands, legally. He’s pretty sure if Fury claims him as an agent there’s not much anybody can do short of dismantling SHIELD in its entirety, but Fury might just as well feed him to the UN.

“C’mon. Siddown.” Sam steers Barnes to rest against the side of a Quinjet, gratefully taking a seat himself on an ammo crate. Barnes slumps back heavily and barely even twitches when Sam starts to peel away the Cap uniform top. The slash on his side is long and unpleasantly jagged, noplace nice to put in stitches. Sam leans back and looks around, clocks somebody in scrubs. “Hey—hey! Got a spare IFAK?”

The woman looks them both over with a hairy eyeball, but ducks into the Quinjet and returns with a well-stocked kit. So, maybe they’re considered part of SHIELD now? Sam has no idea. He’s a bit preoccupied with tearing the field dressing open with his teeth.

Barnes has sagged back against the Quinjet, his eyes closed and his face pale. Sam spits out the corner of the field dressing and slaps it in place; that at least gets Barnes to flinch and hiss. “You with me?” Sam snaps. “No fadin’ out now, man.”

“I’m not fading,” Barnes says without opening his eyes. “I’m doing that meditation bullshit you’re always after me to try.”

Sam snorts, scooting closer to apply pressure. “Oh, yeah? How’s that going?”

“It’s great. I see my ancestors. Ow, fuck. This is what the Chair Force calls first aid?”

“You’re not bleeding out, are ya?”

“Bitch, I might be.”

“Did you just quote—you just quoted Gucci Mane at me. The hell, man, I thought you only listened to white-boy emo bands.”

“I’m a Renaissance guy. Just tape the dressing on, it’ll heal on its own.”

Sam’s definitely heard that one before, but not from somebody with super-science in his bloodstream. Grudgingly he decides to trust it, just this once.

-o-

By 1500 Sam Wilson’s name is in every reporter’s mouth. They replay his heroics from the attempted HYDRA coup, side-by-side with him grabbing an improvised nuke and flying it out of the city while barely able to stand upright.

-o-

After a while somebody comes to get them. It’s a younger Asian guy in a suit, nervous but not armed. “Sergeant Wilson? Sergeant Barnes? If you’ll come with me we can get you checked out in medical.”

Which, okay. Apparently, that’s how they’re playing it. Sam cuts a quick look at Barnes, who says only, “No medical.”

He does come along and stands guard over Sam while he gets the soft cast peeled off and his leg checked out. It’s swollen and sore, but he hasn’t refractured anything. The nurse gives him an IV of fluid and some painkillers, looks at Barnes—who is still bleeding, but noticeably slower than before—and walks out without even trying.

There’s a TV playing in the corner of the room; they’re breaking news. Sam leans back into the bed with a sigh. “You think I’ll get an action figure outta this?”

There’s the scrape of a chair as Barnes sits next to his bed. “Stark was the one with the toy line.”

“Aw, c’mon, just a little action figure. Do you see that shit?” The news is playing video of him zipping through the city, duking it out with the HYDRA asshole. “That’s money, right there. Two thousand little black boys, playing pararescue in their backyards, I can see it now. Holy shit these are good painkillers.”

For a while they sit quietly while Sam marinates in the beauty of barbiturates. When he finally gets it together enough to turn his head, Barnes is still sitting in the chair staring into the middle distance. Except that’s not quite it: Sam has seen the thousand-yard stare a million times, on a million combat vets who are stuck trying to figure out how to live inside their own heads.

This isn’t that. This is…this is a combat vet who’s just come home and is wondering, _Is this it? Is it over now?_

Which, no. It’s never really over.

“Hey,” Sam says, waggling one hand. Barnes gives him eye contact again pretty quick; Sam’s pretty sure this time that it’s a good thing. “You okay?”

A furrow draws itself between Barnes’ eyes. He seems to actually mull the question over, like he’s taking a walk through his inner mind. Sam doesn’t even want to guess what kind of shit lives in there, but Barnes comes back pretty quick. “Yeah,” Barnes says. “Yeah, I am.”

Something about the way he says it makes Sam wish that he wasn’t currently high as a kite; but hell, he’s not Barnes’ counselor anymore. “I need t’introduce you to Nikki,” Sam says, closing his eyes. “She’ll…take good care of you, man.”

“How about you worry ‘bout yourself for a while, Sam.”

Sam’s eyelids feel like cement, but he digs up a smirk. “Yeah. Not so good at that one. You gonna—?”

The sudden, sharp squeak of a chair leg on the floor gets his eyes open. Barnes is sitting forward, looking through the glass observation window with an intensity that makes Sam clench the sides of the bed, expecting an attack—except when he looks that direction, too, all he sees is another bed being wheeled into the room next to his.

The guy on the bed has short blond hair and for a second Sam thinks, _oh shit_ , but on second glance the build is all wrong. Way too small and wiry. The guy’s obviously been transferred from a surgery room somewhere else: Sam clocks an IV, a wound VAC, a cath bag, and a few other fun items.

“I gotta,” Barnes says, getting up. He doesn’t take his eyes off the observation window as he carefully moves to the door and even more carefully eases it open to slip outside.

Sam goes back to watching through the window. The blond guy is awake, which can’t be too fun that soon after surgery, and seems to actually be talking to the nurses and specialists with a weary familiarity. His face is—Sam squints. It’s not Captain America like he first thought, but it’s something in that…oh shit, it’s Hawkeye. Clint Barton.

Shit.

Sam sits up a little more then falls back with a wince. He looks at his door, which stays closed, and then leans over in the bed to try and see Barton’s door. It’s opening and closing plenty to admit staff, enough that eventually someone just props it open. It’s just staff, though, no one else.

A nurse comes in to ask Sam if he needs anything; he could probably do with another pain pill soon but he waves it off. She gets him to drink some water, checks his leg, then leaves.

Barton’s people are filtering out, too, leaving him grayish and propped up on pillows. The front of his hospital gown is lumpy with bandages. He breathes slow and steady in a way that says it hurts. From the next room over, Sam watches every rise and fall of his chest.

So he sees it when Barton opens his eyes and looks at the door. He sees it when Barton starts to smile, his eyes lighting with relief. He sees it when that relief turns to shock, to horror, to grief.

By the time Barton has started to yell _no no no fuck no_ loud enough for Sam to hear, Barnes is on him. He climbs right into Barton’s bed and holds him down, wraps his bigger body around him like he can shield him from the world.

Sam watches long enough to see the nurse come in, then turns his head to the side and closes his eyes and ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: medical issues, canon character death of Coulson.


	12. There’s things that I have done/You never should ever know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So that finally happens. Ummmm, canon typical violence in this chapter. Some hints of bloodplay.

The locker room is empty. Somebody high up had probably ordered everyone to clear out. Barnes doesn’t quite have it in him to feel grateful.

He sets his change of clothing down on a wooden bench between the lockers. It’s dark gray sweats and a lighter gray t-shirt, both emblazoned with the SHIELD logo: he’s really come in from the cold, now, after all these years of dodging Fury’s attempts to officially recruit him. It’s this or run, and he doesn’t have that in him right now, either.

Stripping off the tattered and bloody Captain America uniform, he shuffles across cold tile to the showerheads and turns one on. It blasts out over him; he thinks the water might be cold, but he can’t really tell at the moment.

Bracing both hands against the wall, he leans his face into the spray and takes stock.

His right leg is trembling slightly, muscles knitting together around the puncture in his thigh. It’s mostly stopped bleeding but he needs to get off that leg soon. His side aches: he’s got broken ribs and another laceration, enough to limit his arm movement by 40%. His entire back is stiffening up and something grinds unpleasantly in his neck every time he moves his head. His feet hurt like hell.

His brain is…

He kind of stalls out there for a while and floats, looking down at the water as it spatters pinkish over his thighs and ankles. There’s more red at his feet, swirling through the puddles and leaking into the clean metal drains at the edges of the shower. There are seven showerheads, each with a little drain. How often does someone clean them? What weird shit has been washed off in these showers? He’s heard plenty of stories from Clint—no, don’t think about that yet, either.

He thinks the water might be warming up. Lifting his head, he lets it run over his face.

After a while, gingerly, he tries again.

His brain feels like someone turned it inside-out, scraped it clean, then turned it back again. It’s felt this way before, after really intense sessions with Sam: something has been lifted from him that he didn’t know he had been carrying, except this was bigger than anything Sam managed to peel off his shoulders. Its absence is…fuck, he doesn’t even know.

On some level, he’d always known it was there—or at least he’d known enough to fear being _erased_. The chair, and this: the locked door inside of his head that he’d battered at for years before he gave up and grew around it like a stubborn vine sprouting from broken concrete. That’s why—he’d been so scared of Rogers, he realizes, because somewhere in his head he’s been waiting for this to happen. For someone to show up and rip that door open; tear at the healed scar that is Barnes’ life, that is _Barnes_.

Right idea but wrong person, it turns out.

It’s gone now, he thinks. He’s almost sure. Swallowing, he mumbles the trigger words aloud to himself, first in Russian like Josef then in English, Spanish, Swahili, French. Nothing. He stays himself— _himself_ , all of seven years old, with his ragged hair dyed black and his head full of song lyrics. It’s impossible, he knows, to rewrite brain chemistry through sheer force of fucking _will_ but that feels like what he’s done: whatever past lives had been locked away inside him, they’re now either gone or buried so deep that he can’t feel their presence anymore.

For the first time that he can remember, he’s alone in his head. No whisper of unseen memories or threat of erasure…it’s just him in there.

He’s free.

Swiping his dripping hair out of his face, Barnes reaches up and twists the shower handle until the stream of now-hot water switches off. Then he turns towards the lockers and his clothes.

Steve Rogers is leaning against the end of last row of lockers.

Barnes freezes midstep. Even his breath stops in his throat. His vision flattens out, brain taking in information as fast as it can: Rogers is wearing the same SHIELD sweats and t-shirt that Barnes received. There’s a visible row of black stitches bristling across the side of his throat, red with inflammation. He’s pale, likely still recovering from losing so much blood. Most of his weight is on one foot, his shoulder propped against the edge of the lockers and his thumbs hooked in the top of his sweatpants; but his body is _not_ relaxed.

“Your face grew back,” Rogers observes.

Drops of water drip into Barnes’ eyes. He blinks them away quickly, half-expecting Rogers to lunge at him in the split-second of blindness; but Rogers just stands there looking at him, his expression as inscrutable as his voice. They’re still alone in the room: no one else has snuck in alongside Rogers. But of course they haven’t, no one else could possibly do that. Well, no one left alive after today. Why isn’t Rogers moving. How is he even here. Wait, of course he’s here: Clint is here. The sheer awfulness of _that_ had overwhelmed Barnes, washed out the thought of anything else, but of course SHIELD transported Captain America to HQ as well.

Why the fuck isn’t Rogers doing anything.

Barnes realizes that he’s nearly panting, taking short even breathes too quickly. He forces himself to slow down and maybe Rogers can hear the shift because he drops his gaze to Barnes’ mouth…then further. His throat, his shoulders, his chest. Rogers likes to look; Barnes remembers that. He likes to _inspect_.

 _Don’t fucking do it_ , Barnes thinks desperately in the direction of his own cock. It completely ignores him and twitches to life, filling with blood. _Oh my god_.

Rogers doesn’t react to that, either, just continues his methodical examination of Barnes’ naked, dripping body. After a moment, he says: “I had dreams about you—after New York, a few, but after Stark and I rescued you they got worse. Do you know what it was? Your smell. I don’t even know when the hell I had time to catch a fuckin’ whiff but I did and something in my head said, he smells just like Bucky. Just that. A smell. Hell, I thought I was going crazy.”

His gaze lands on the metal arm and the scarring that surrounds its attachment point. There he seems to pause, a crack drawing itself between his serene brows. It’s enough to unfreeze Barnes: he takes one short step forward, then another, then another. His towel and clothes are on the bench five feet in front of Rogers and Barnes makes himself walk to them. Rogers watches his approach dispassionately, still slouched against the lockers.

Plucking up the way-too-small towel, Barnes clears his throat and says, “Should you be out of medical?”

Rogers doesn’t answer, just stands there _watching_ while Barnes, fumbling, scrubs the water from his skin then hurries into plain white underwear and the grey sweatpants. His cock bobs in front of him, half-hard, and he scowls, tucking it away roughly under the band of the sweatpants.

When he looks up Rogers hasn’t moved an inch. “What?” Barnes barks. That gets the very slightest lift of an eyebrow. “ _What?_ Are you just gonna stand there? Fuckin’— _say_ something.”

“I’m just wondering who the hell you are,” Rogers says in a low voice. It’s not _that_ voice, the one he uses on battlefields and bedrooms, but it’s close enough that Barnes’ skin breaks out in goosebumps.

“I’m…I’m Bucky Barnes.”

“No, you’re not.”

Barnes stiffens. Of all the possible reactions that Rogers could have had, he’d never imagined this one. For a fleeting moment he panics—what if Rogers _could_ actually tell, just from looking at him? What if all of it was a lie?—before something in him snaps back: “The _hell_ I’m not.”

There’s a huge emotion rising to the surface behind the smooth mask of Roger’s expression. It colors his voice as he says, “Bucky wouldn’t have done this. Two years—two years and change since I met you. _He_ wouldn’t have let me go on thinking that he was dead, when the whole time he was right there.”

“So whether or not I’m Bucky Barnes depends entirely on how I treat you?”

Rogers’ eyes widen, pupils dilating. Fear response. Barnes doesn’t even know _what_ to do with that, so he ducks his head and focuses on wiping off his metal arm. It always takes a while: none of it rusts and the electrical components are well-protected, but there are so many plates and joints where water lingers. Barnes longs for his hairdryer at home. He longs for home, period.

Keeping his gaze focused on his task he inquires, “What’d you figure I am? If I’m not Bucky Barnes.”

There’s a beat of silence. Barnes can _feel_ Rogers’ gaze moving over his skin—or maybe that’s just his fucking imagination, who the hell knows? Finally he answers, “A clone. They have those now—which means HYDRA probably had them sooner.”

Abandoning his arm to finish air drying, Barnes bends at the waist and begins toweling off his head. “Right. Whole army of us, Bucky Barnes clones far as the eye can see. Fuck!”

Something nicked his scalp—a lingering glass shard, probably, or some other piece of debris stuck in his hair. Immediately Barnes feels blood well up; head wounds always bleed like crazy. He fumbles after whatever cut him, but his metal fingers lack dexterity and when he lifts his other arm he cuts off halfway through the motion with a hiss. His ribs scream in protest.

The scuff of hospital slippers on the floor makes him twitch, and then Rogers’ hands are on him. On his head, holding him still as his fingers sift through the damp tendrils of Barnes’ hair. Jesus fucking Christ. “Or a robot,” Rogers continues, casual like he isn’t making Barnes’ entire body shudder apart just by gently but firmly holding his head in place.

“Makes sense,” Barnes manages to croak. “With the arm.”

“Yeah,” Rogers says. “’Cept I’m pretty sure that robots don’t bleed.”

His fingers are surprisingly delicate as they pluck out the glass shard—artist’s hands, Barnes remembers. Stepping back, he scrubs the towel through his hair then drops it quickly, anxious to be blind even for a moment.

He’s just in time to look up and see Rogers stick his fingers—red with Barnes’ blood—into his mouth and _suck_.

He takes them out again just as fast, too-loud slick pop in the quiet room, guilt overtaking the flash of euphoria, but it’s too late. Barnes has seen and Barnes goes hot down the center of his body from chin to groin. In that split-second all of his aversion to physical touch; all of his wariness about what Rogers wants from him; all of it falls away in the face of the overwhelming desire to know what his blood tastes like in Steve Rogers’ mouth.

Closing the short distance between them, he kind of grabs Rogers by the head and pushes his tongue into his mouth. As first kisses go it’s probably the worst, clumsiest, most awkward and ill-timed thing in the world; Barnes is half a second into it and already knows his brain will be poking him with this in the middle of the goddamn night. Rogers’ mouth is warm and weird and full of teeth; at first it’s kind of gross but then Rogers starts to _kiss back_ and Barnes pretty much loses his mind, scrabbling at Rogers’ shoulders like he wants to climb this blond goddamn mountain.

Except then of course Rogers picks him up and throws him into a fucking wall.

His ribs spasm and his breath leaves him in a hiss. “Don’t you fuckin’—don’t you _dare_ ,” Rogers is shouting and Barnes just barely ducks in time to avoid the punch that follows this demand. It goes straight into the concrete wall instead.

There’s the crack of bone. Rogers doesn’t even seem to notice, striking with his knee next. Barnes twists to the side and uses his shoulder to knock Rogers away from him, dancing backward.

“Don’t do this,” he says, or tries to. It comes out as a wheeze.

Either Rogers doesn’t hear or he doesn’t care because he does it: he comes at Barnes swinging.

Barnes gives ground immediately, blocking and parrying blows without returning any. He moves backward through the locker room; his escape routes are limited. There’s surveillance in the room but it’s strictly infrared and who the fuck even knows if anyone’s paying attention right now, with the UN rushing in to grab control.

Rogers swings at his head and Barnes spins out of the way, automatically using the motion to sweep the back of a knee. It knocks Rogers off-balance for a moment; he’s fighting wild, with none of his usual soldierly discipline, and the stitches at his throat have started to ooze blood.

He’s still so fucking _fast_. He catches Barnes on a block and tries to put him in an arm lock, throw him against the lockers again. It’s too much like Josef, before, and Barnes has to catch himself from sending his metal fist into Rogers’ teeth on instinct. Instead he twists and rolls, lets Rogers’ momentum send him tripping over Barnes and into the lockers himself.

“Goddamn you,” Rogers snarls. He shoves off and Barnes scrambles up, backing away. Rogers’ face twists, an expression Barnes has never seen before. “ _Fight me_ you fucking bastard!”

“You really don’t want that,” Barnes says. It’s a lie and they both know it. That’s exactly what Rogers wants.

It’s only a matter of time before he gets it: a knee connects with Barnes’ face, splitting his lip and breaking his nose, and in the time it takes for his head to snap backward his body moves without him, striking at Rogers’ throat and his kneecap.

By the time he grabs the controls again, Rogers has blocked both strikes and grabbed him by the arm, putting him in a hold. If he drops his weight downward he’ll dislocate Barnes’ shoulder; Barnes can feel the windup—and the hesitation.

Jackknifing his body, Barnes hooks both knees on either side of Rogers head and straightens with a snap that flips them both through the air, sending Rogers straight through the bench and into the lockers. They dent badly and the whole row of them wobbles but doesn’t fall. Barnes lands flat on his back and kips upward, taking several steps backward. Rogers staggers back to his feet. There’s blood around his collar.

They both breathe.

“My name,” Barnes says through a mouthful of blood, “is James…Buchanan…Barnes.”

“ _No it’s **not**_ ,” Rogers howls, launching himself fist-first at Barnes.

They go down together in a tangle of limbs, cracking another bench in the landing then rolling off with Barnes underneath. He’s managed to wrap his legs around Rogers’ waist, legs hooked behind his back. It’s the perfect position for another throw or to simply turn his hips inward and squeeze Rogers until he pops—but he does neither.

Above him Rogers is a heaving, wild-eyed mess, still trying to hit with his good arm. Barnes lets him get a few blows in then lashes out, snake-fast, and grabs Roger’s fist with his metal one. They struggle over it; they’re almost evenly matched and for a moment, again, it’s too much like today, like _Josef_.

But then he feels Rogers’ terrible soldier strength falter. It’s a weakness of the will rather than the body and Barnes takes it, takes Rogers’ fist and guides it inch by shuddering, resisting inch to the side of his own head, not far from from the cut that started all of this.

He rubs the hard lump on the left side of his head against Rogers’ knuckle. “Feel that?”

“What is it?” Rogers grits out.

“It’s a screw. It holds one of the rods in place.”

Rogers blinks, wavering. He seems so huge in the shoulders, but the waist and hips that Barnes has his legs clamped around feel almost slender. Delicate. “What rods?”

“The two-inch conductive rods that go down to the center of my brain. That’s how the chair worked—if I ever did anything they didn’t like, they’d strap me down and fry my fucking brain.”

The waver turns into a flinch. Rogers tries to pull back and Barnes lunges up, grabbing him by the front of his white t-shirt. The fabric twists and strains in his hands; Barnes has the stray, incongruous thought that human things never fit them, never hold them right. They are something else, something other than human, and now they are—hopefully—the only ones of their kind.

Rogers’ face is inches from his, blue eyes in a golden field streaked by red. Barnes lets his lips curl back from his teeth and snarls, “My _name_ —is James. Buchanan. Barnes. Maybe I’m not the guy you knew but that’s who I _am_. I have spent seven fucking years fighting for every _fucking_ inch so you don’t get to _come in here_ and tell me that I did it all _wrong_.”

Rogers is tense against him like he’s still spoiling for a fight. If he swings again Barnes isn’t sure that he’s got it in him to take another hit or if he’d just shatter apart. He feels like tenderized meat, all of him raw and pummeled.

There’s a crash in the direction of the door. Rogers must have blocked it off when he came in, but someone on the other side of the mess shouts, “Sergeant Barnes! Are you all right?”

And that shouldn’t be as big a surprise as it is—but apparently once SHIELD commits to something, they move fast with the memos. “Yeah,” Barnes calls back, or tries. He cuts off into coughing, which turns into pained gasps. Fuck, his fucking _ribs_.

Big hands settle against his sides. They don’t grip or strike, just apply enough pressure that Barnes can get some oxygen and he sucks it in gratefully.

Once he’s stopped seeing spots he says, “Are you wearing underwear?”

“What?”

“Underwear. Got any on?” He reaches for the wrist of his left arm, pressing and then flicking open the hidden compartment there. A thumbnail flashdrive pops out.

There’s another crash at the door. Rogers barely seems to notice: he’s staring at Barnes’ face like they’re having some dramatic, heartfelt moment on a sinking ship instead of crouched, panting and bloodied—and in Barnes’ case, half-naked—in an underground locker room, so Barnes just reaches out and pulls his pants down. _That_ gets Rogers’ attention, and he grabs Barnes’ wrists. His grip isn’t tight, though, and he doesn’t say anything as Barnes tugs out the band of his underwear, reaches past his flushed dick, and tucks the flashdrive right behind his balls.

Rogers still hasn’t looked away from his face. Barnes wants to yell something like _Blink goddammit_ , but instead he pulls his hands back and says, “That’s me. The Winter Soldier project, the Russians, HYDRA, everything I could find. You want to know what I am? It’s all there.”

He starts to lean back and then, fuck it, goes in again. If possible this kiss is even worse: his nose is broken and hurts like a motherfucker, blood spilling everywhere. The pain makes his eyes run. He can’t breathe through his nostrils at all and he still doesn’t know what to do with his tongue except lick a lot.

Rogers makes a muffled noise, unexpectedly high in pitch, and his long-fingered artist hands come up to hold Barnes’ face as gentle as they did before. _He_ kisses like he knows how, hot and unexpected—all of him is so unexpected and Barnes thinks, _I had it all wrong_.

He doesn’t actually say that. Better not to, in case this really is the last time they meet.

Peeling himself away and standing up _sucks_ , but somebody’s breaking down the door and heaving a table out of the way. It’s Carter—the junior one—and Romanoff, along with half a dozen SHIELD officers in full combat gear.

Barnes puts his hands up—but when they swarm in they envelop him. They move to protect _him_ , and it’s Rogers’ turn to lift his hands slowly, letting them snap thick magnetic cuffs on his wrists and pull him out of the room.

 


	13. I am not afraid to keep on living/I am not afraid to walk this world alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sweet CHRIST this chapter was like pulling teeth. Trigger warnings for the aftermath of hospitalization, nothing else I can think of at the moment.

It turns out that Barnes shouldn’t have bothered with the flash drive: Stark puts most of it up online by the end of the week.

Surprisingly, Stark doesn’t lead with his father’s assassination. Instead he goes chronological, releasing piece by piece over a period of four days with the excuse that his people are carefully scanning files as they go for any classified information before making them public. Since the adamant stance of the US government is that HYDRA was a foreign covert intelligence operation, there’s little that anyone can do to stop him.

The effect is near hysteria as newscasters breathlessly devour each new kernel that Stark throws into their mouths. They especially zero in on the archive of shaky film captures that record the many brainwashing sessions, surgical operations, and medical experiments that had created the Winter Soldier. For Barnes it’s old news, but he still finds himself watching his past self with interest as Bucky Barnes transforms from sickly, scared prisoner to dead-eyed automaton. He’s tried to imagine, more than once, what Bucky Barnes had felt in those wretched moments; what terror and desperation and despair must have consumed him.

Eventually he’d learned to be grateful _not_ to know.

By the time the information dump even gets around to the assassinations, the public has landed in his favor. Congress pushes on with an investigative committee anyways, hammering at Nick Fury in front of the cameras until he snarls, “If I had played by your rules, Senator, we’d all be dead.”

Senator Wyler is halfway out of his chair and stabbing the air with one finger for emphasis. “That was _not_ your decision to make, Director, you risked _millions_ of—”

“You’re right, it wasn’t.” Fury’s voice is ice. “It was Barnes’ decision, and I trusted him.”

“And where _is_ Sergeant Barnes,” asks a general who Barnes doesn’t know. “Why have we not heard from him?”

Barnes, who is hunched over a laptop in the corner of an empty apartment on the SHIELD campus, twitches. Romanoff had sent him this link along with a smiley face emoji, though, so he’s hopeful that the CSPAN recap doesn’t end with a subpoena for his testimony.

It doesn’t. After three more minutes of questioning along those same lines, Fury stops mid-sentence. He pauses for a long moment then ducks his head and stands up. Unclips the plastic badge on his coat. Puts it on the table.

“No,” he says, uncharacteristically quiet. Warily Barnes turns up the sound on his earbuds. “No, I’m not doing that, General Ross. James Buchanan Barnes is the only reason that any of us are alive. He was the source of the HYDRA files three years ago that prevented a fascist takeover of this country, and since then he has worked _every damn day_ to keep us safe. I am not going to let you put a chain around his neck and force him to be your attack dog.”

“Director Fury, no one is suggesting—”

“Not yet, but you will. He scares you and that makes you want to control him. You ask me, he had enough of that under HYDRA. You want the whole truth, here it is: yes, James Barnes is the Winter Soldier and yes, we have been working with him. No, he was never operationally part of SHIELD. I don’t have the authority to order him to report to you and if you expect me to help you track him down then frankly, General, you can go fuck yourself. I resign as head of SHIELD, effective immediately.”

The room erupts into shouts and camera noises as he turns for the door. Barnes winces and yanks his earbuds out.

It all sort of dissolves after that. Hill resigns, too, and takes half of her division out with her. The whole structure of SHIELD wobbles, wavers, and folds into other agencies…the official half, anyway. Someone is still paying for Clint’s medical bills, automated check deposits that appear in his bank account without anyone signing for them. Fury, probably, keeping his network going even as he slips underground to escape the increasingly-frustrated oversight committee.

Somewhere in that whole mess, Steve Rogers disappears, too.

 

-o-

 

Clint comes home on a cold October morning. The chill makes him stiff and unwilling to straighten up all the way despite Natasha’s badgering. “It _hurts_ ,” he snaps, one hand over his guts. He’s never been a big guy but right now he looks so fucking small. Barnes puts an arm across Clint’s back and scowls at Natasha, who throws up her hands.

They manage to get him up to the front door, anyway. “Safe house?” Clint asks wearily as Barnes knocks. His place is a fifth-floor walkup, out of the question. Barnes knows that Clint would have argued for it anyway, so they hadn’t even given him the choice.

“Something like that,” Barnes says as Sam opens the door and looks them over.

Clint perks up, shoots a finger gun at Sam. “Bird dude.”

Lifting his eyebrows, Sam says, “Other bird dude.”

“I want wings,” Clint announces as Barnes passes him to Sam, Natasha trailing behind with his cane and bags of prescription drugs. “You think Stark will make some wings for me? Makes it a lot easier to jump off things when they blow up.”

“Man, it took half a year to learn how to fly the pack,” Sam tells him as he leads their convoy into the living room. Barnes has been sacked out on the couch for the last three weeks, but they’ve cleaned it up enough that hopefully Clint won’t notice that he’s kicking Barnes out of his nest. “If you really want to strap a rocket next to your asshole, be my guest. You can’t have mine,” he adds as Clint draws in a breath.

“How about just borrowsies? I’ll bring ‘em back.”

“You’re already borrowing my couch,” Sam retorts as he eases Clint down. Sam’s moving pretty well, barely a limp left in his walk anymore.

“Boys, boys, you’re both cute adrenaline junkies with an uncomfortable bird fetish,” Natasha says as she heads into the kitchen with the meds.

“It’s not a—I didn’t name the damn Falcon program!” Sam shouts after her.

“It’s kinda a fetish for me,” Clint admits, settling in the cushions.

The look that Sam shoots him makes Barnes, hovering against the wall, smile a little for the first time in weeks.

Sam’s place isn’t that big, but Natasha folds herself into the spare room among Sam’s weightlifting equipment, her guns and stingers arranged around her inflatable like the aura of a Catholic saint. By silent agreement they take turns keeping watch, less worried about attack from outside than Clint attempting to escape the hideaway bed in the middle of the night.

She also gifts him with a makeover and a dossier: apparently a bunch of second-level threats in Central and Southern America have recently gone up in smoke. Some HYDRA, but AIM, too, not to mention a few completely unaffiliated criminals who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong crime and wound up with their legs and arms broken.

“Looks like someone with some anger issues,” Natasha comments. She’s building up a new persona, all bubbly and sarcastic. At first Barnes couldn’t figure out who it was for, but then he’d noticed the eyes that Sam was making across the breakfast table.

He hopes that Natasha sticks around long enough to realize she doesn’t need the persona—or hell, maybe she does. They’ve all got their ways to cope.

The ways to cope identified in the dossier are not especially healthy and likely to attract the wrong kind of attention before much longer—say, from a certain general. Barnes sits with it for a while on the back porch of Sam’s house, listening to Clint and Natasha quietly talking in Polish…at least until their conversation hesitantly turns to Coulson. Then he gets up and goes out further in the back yard to sit in the chair that Sam has definitely absolutely not been smoking in.

Eventually Sam joins him, dragging out one of the kitchen chairs and giving Barnes’ new hair color an incredulous look. “Nice hair, Eminem. Sounds like it’s getting pretty heavy in there, they gonna be okay?”

As okay as any of them, which is as relative as it fucking gets. Barnes shrugs then flips to the front of the dossier when Sam casts it a curious glance.

Sam’s eyebrows rise. “You’re going after him, huh?”

“Somebody is,” Barnes says. “If he’s gonna stay out of prison I think it’s gotta be me.”

“Need any help?” Sam asks, like he isn’t absently grinding his knuckle into his thigh, strumming the still-healing muscle back and forth. 

“I’m good.” Standing up, Barnes lets the dossier drop onto his chair with a _splat_. He only gets a few feet away, though, before he stops. Turns back. Picks up the dossier. Turns the chair around. Sits down and looks hard at Sam.

“Do _you_ need help?” he asks.

 “Me?” Sam asks. Like he’s genuinely confused.

Barnes rolls his eyes because _really_.

Sam’s face goes through a couple of different expressions. “Hey, man, that’s—okay, wait,” he says, cutting himself off before Barnes can. “Okay, yeah. Just…damn, dude. What the hell happened out there?”

There’s no good way to explain that it wasn’t Josef, really—that was the stimulus, yeah, but...Josef doesn’t get to claim fucking credit for seven years of clawing his way to personhood. He just came along and made Barnes realize how far he’d come from the empty shell. Barnes did that, and Sam. Clint, Natasha, fucking Gerard Way; all of them.

He isn’t going to win awards for mental health anytime soon, but he can do this: sit in a friend’s backyard and ask if they need support.

Sam visibly wrestles with it for a second. Finally, he laughs a little, rubbing a hand over his face. “I don’t even know. I get so focused, sometimes—but it helps to take care of other people. I mean, there are worse coping mechanisms, right? But all that does is kick my bullshit further down the road. I take care of other people until I burn out and then they’re all so goddamned _surprised_ when I do.”

Mentally Barnes notes the buried vein of bitterness underneath Sam’s words and says, “So I should ask you again in a month?”

Sam coughs a laugh and drags out his cigarettes. “Yeah. Maybe two—you brought me a coupla casualties, so I’ll be ridin’ that wave for a while longer yet.”

“Good to hear,” Barnes retorts even as he makes another mental note. _T-minus seventy-five days: tie Sam to a chair and make him talk about his feelings._

Part of Barnes is looking forward to payback; another part is aware that he probably shouldn’t be viewing cognitive therapy as ‘payback.’

 

-o-

 

Once he starts looking, Rogers is absurdly easy to find. Which makes Barnes think that General Ross knows exactly where to look, too, and is holding off until Rogers conveniently takes out a few more public enemies.

Off the top of his head Barnes doesn’t know if he’s ever been to Lima before. HYDRA had extensive operations in Venezuela and Columbia, of course, but he doesn’t remember seeing Peru mentioned in any of his files. It’s a smoggy, dense city that smells strongly of the ocean. The hotel that Rogers has been using as his base of operations crouches in the shadow of its elevated highway; trucks roar by only a dozen feet from Barnes’ head as he lets himself into the hotel room.

There isn’t much to see: Rogers has obviously been traveling light. He’s probably got most of his gear on him—the only things left in the room are protein bars, two liter jugs of purified water, and an extensive med kit laid out neatly on the small table next to the bed, waiting to be used. The duffel bag placed at the foot of the bed slumps, empty.

Or nearly empty. A small, thin notebook sits at the bottom of the duffel. Barnes digs it out and opens it to find his own eyes looking back at him, drawn in rough pencil.

Except it’s not _him_. Someone else is looking out of _his_ eyes and for a moment Barnes feels adrift. 

There’s more, as he turns the pages: a cleft jaw, a hand, a barely-filled-in profile outline. Pieces of a whole, fragments obviously drawn from memory in soft, light strokes. Not all of them are of the same subject, there’s a few sketches of cars and pigeons and what might be a jellyfish floating among clouds? But invariably Rogers keeps returning to his fractured portrait of Bucky Barnes. Or the Bucky Barnes that was, anyway. Barnes has seen pictures, of course: there weren’t many, the newsreels usually focused on Rogers, but Sergeant Barnes was always at his shoulder. The sketches capture less guarded moments than found in wartime propaganda, but it’s unmistakably Rogers’ childhood friend and second-in-command.

And then, near the back of the small notebook, in far heavier strokes that left grooves in the paper: Barnes, as he is now. His face, surrounded by damp-looking hair, staring out of the page.

The difference is like a punch to the gut, jolting him back to life in his own body. Even without the more obvious details—the arm, the scars, the hair dye—he looks entirely changed from before. Barnes takes a few moments to flip back and forth, from the previous drawings to this inarguably newest one. The features are the same, but Rogers has captured something…something intangible.

When Barnes had first discovered who he’d been before HYDRA got their hands on him, he’d spent hours sitting in front of the mirror, comparing the person he saw there to the one in the photographs. Trying to grope after some invisible spark that might bring James Buchanan Barnes back to life inside of him. He’d cut his hair, styled it carefully, hunted down period clothes, copied the gestures and stance and mannerisms documented by historians.

He’d felt like a puppeteer at a funeral, propping up a corpse.

But this—in the sketch, he is _him_. Those eyes on the paper are his, as he is now, and Barnes finds himself transfixed.

Behind him, there’s the click of a lock and the scuff of a boot—too quiet for non-enhanced ears. It takes some effort but Barnes gives Rogers his back.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Steve growls.

Which—well, okay, fair. Barnes turns, not slowly but slow enough not to be a threat. As soon as Rogers sees his face he blinks and lowers the gun, his eyes flicking between Barnes’ face and his hair.

“Romanoff,” Barnes says by way of explanation. She’d helped him dye his hair blond, almost white, and cut it short enough that it spiked all over with a little gel; he’s pretty sure he knows what she was going for, especially after she shoved a ratty leather jacket at him.

“How did you find me?” Rogers says once he’s recovered.

“Wasn’t hard—you’ve been busy.” Closing the notebook, Barnes carefully sets it back inside the duffel then turns to face Rogers with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Then he thinks that’s too like the way Sergeant Barnes used to stand, and drops them to hang at his sides. “Who’s even worth going after, around here?”

Rogers scowls, crossing to the med kit. He’s only got a few visible cuts but there’s a definite hitch in his gait—shattered a kneecap, maybe, or broken fibula. “Gun runners. They got their hands on some of the Chitauri tech, been sellin’ it on the black market. I can’t let that kind of thing fall into the wrong hands. I’m guessing Fury sent you?”

“No.” Though Romanoff got her dossier from somewhere, obviously. Fury’s still pulling all their strings; but after the Congressional hearing, Barnes finds himself fairly okay with the idea. “I’m alone, but I’m guessing General Ross isn’t too far behind me. You wanna come in with me, or with them?”

Rogers gives him a hard look as he strips off his jacket. He’s dressed pretty non-descript, even grew a beard. The attempt is almost laughable: Barnes could pick him out of a crowded plaza just from the set of his shoulders, the shape of his body, the way he breathes.

Maybe that’s not something he should be thinking right now.

“Come in _where_?” Rogers demands as he cracks an instant cold pack and straps it to his knee. “Last I checked, SHIELD is gone, Stark Industries isn’t taking my calls, and I’m not inclined to work for Ross.”

And that’s…fair. Rogers went straight from serving in the Army of World War II to fighting aliens for SHIELD; of course he thinks this is a recruitment speech. Barnes can’t even blame him, having spent several years tracking HYDRA around the globe himself.

The thing is—he doesn’t want to do that anymore. He wants to go home. He wants to go back to Sam’s yard and bully him— _T-minus seventy-one days_ —to get help; he wants to watch _Dog Cops_ with Clint and listen to his heartbeat; he even wants to sit in the dark with Natasha and mutter in Russian about all the things they can’t say in daylight, or in English.

He says: “Come home with me.”

Rogers stills, eyes narrowing. “They were smart, sending you.”

“Fucking—no one _sent_ me. Romanoff gave me a file because she was worried you’d get arrested, and you are, if you don’t fucking— _stop_. Don’t you want to stop?”

“How can you even ask me that? People are going to get _hurt_ if I don’t—”

“People are gonna get hurt if you _do_. The world’s full of fucking pain, Rogers. I know that better than most.”

A spasm crosses Rogers’ expression, full of more pain than he’s shown while tending his wounds. He looks away and Barnes thinks, _Oh_.

He tries to make his voice a little gentler. “I don’t remember any of it. I woke up in 2007 and there was nothing. They took out my memories of…before. But they took themselves out, too.”

Pain of a different sort seems to grip Rogers tight; but after a moment he breathes out through his teeth and says, “Well. That’s a helluva gift, ain’t it?”

He starts packing up the med kit, his eyes on his task and his movements jerky.

“You need to come back with me,” Barnes starts then flinches backward as Rogers throws down the kit with a crash. Bandages roll everywhere. Something breaks.

“ _Why_? To _what_? They’re all _your_ friends, not mine. You took my uniform, you took my shield, _you_ get to be their dancing monkey now.”

“The fuck I am. You think Ross isn’t going to use you as an excuse to crack down on the rest of us? There’s already talk about some kind of special prison for people like us, and you are giving them _every_ excuse to test it out. Go get a regular fucking job, climb a mountain, do anything except get yourself killed or locked up and stir up _more_ trouble for the rest of us!”

Rogers looks at him then down at the med kit in disarray. At his sides, his hands twitch compulsively into fists. His lips are pulled back from his teeth and he’s taking short, even breaths like he’s gearing up—but there’s no explosion.

Knowledge blossoms in Barnes’ mind: _he can’t stop._ There is a very real anger and violence in Rogers that, left simmering, consumes him.

That thought quickly hooks into another, and this one Barnes blurts aloud: “That’s why you do it. The women. And now you think you can’t do _that_ , anymore, so you—”

He cuts off, wishing he could eat the words out of the air.

“What women?” Rogers snaps. Barnes tries like hell to control his own face but fails. Fortunately, so does Rogers and Barnes can identify: shock, embarrassment, cold rage. “Did Fury have you do that, too? Is there gonna be video on CNN— _Captain America’s kinky secret revealed_.”

“No—”

“That’s some real good leverage you got there, pal.” Rogers’ voice has gotten strangled but his eyes are clear and blazing. “Did they give you a raise for that one? Were some of the gals plants?”

“ _No_. Fury didn’t know I had you under surveillance. I did that—”

“Did you like it?” Rogers steps closer, his jaw jutted out. “Did you get off on it, on watching me—did I put on a good enough show for you?”

He means it as a taunt but the answer is _yes yes yes_. Barnes can’t speak: Rogers is suddenly too close and too big and Barnes’ chest is in a vice, but that’s a blessing because if he could open his mouth it would only say _yes._

Rogers is _looking_ at him, and it’s that look again. Assessing. Like he can mentally peel up the outer few layers of Barnes’ disguise to peek underneath. The longer he looks, the more anger drains out of his expression: his lips part a little, his eyes narrow then widen. He shifts in place, probably just drawing breath, but it’s officially _too fucking much_.

Barnes bolts. He dives out the bathroom window.

He spends a while lurking in the blackberry bushes and broken glass behind the hotel, kicking himself, before he screws his courage back in place and marches into the hotel room. In the interim Rogers has stretched out on the bed, his ankles crossed. His boots are off and his socks look lumpy; he darned them, Barnes realizes, and feels this weird pang in his chest.

Rogers is flipping through channels on the TV but when Barnes comes back in he turns it off and sets the remote down by his hip. Other than that, he doesn’t move. His previous anger has been washed away completely and now he’s searching Barnes with his eyes as though for a hidden hand signal.

Taking a deep breath, Barnes sits down on the foot of the bed and says, “When I first woke up here and figured out I was Bucky Barnes, I read all the books I could find. _The Captain and His Commandoes_. _Steve Rogers, the Early Life_. _Killing Captain America_.”

“Those are shit,” Rogers interrupts, looking aghast.

“I know that _now_ ,” Barnes snaps. “But I didn’t then. I thought that’s what we were really like—all noble and patriarchal and shit. Golly gee, apple pie, Americana. The more I read—I thought, all those guys in the books would have hated me, not just because of the Winter Soldier, but who I am now. I’m not noble. I’m a fucking trainwreck, but fuck it, fuck all of that noise because I’m _alive,_ okay, I’m a mess but I’m still here.

“Then you woke up. And I was so fucking scared of you, ‘cause I thought you’d—try to change me back, somehow, or maybe just _seeing_ you would do it. So I hid. You don’t get to be mad at Clint or Natasha or Sam—wait, have you met Sam?”

“The fellah with the wings?” Steve asks quietly. “I haven’t yet, but I’d like to.”

“You should, Sam is—he helped me, so much. Him and Clint. All of them. When they didn’t tell you…they were just watching out for me.”

Rogers looks… _pained_ , but he says, “I’m glad that you had them in your corner, B—do you—what do I call you?” he asks, and there’s a hysterical note in his voice.

“Barnes, I guess. I don’t know. Why the hell did he go by Bucky, anyway?”

He catches the third-person reference too late and flinches; but Rogers seems to just roll with it, even smiling as he answers. “John Miller called you Buck in the second grade on account of your teeth. You really had to grow into your teeth.”

“And you kept calling me that?”

“You insisted. Anything mean that anyone ever said about you, you’d throw right back in their faces. Plus, you knocked John Miller’s front teeth out and called him Gappy, so you were a pair.”

Barnes snorts. It’s weird, maybe, that stories about Bucky Barnes being a grade-school dick are so comforting to him, but whatever. Rogers looks pretty happy to remember them and that’s. Well. That’s the whole fucking point.

“I had it all wrong,” Barnes says. Fuck, Rogers is _looking_ at him and Barnes has no idea how to even get this out, but he _has to_ find the right words to this gooey, unformed idea inside of him. “You weren’t that guy in the books, you’re just as fucked up as I am. There’s…that guy in the books, there was never any space with him, he was just all straight lines. But you’re not. I figured that out when I saw you with the women. Why only women?” he adds. It probably comes out a lot more judgmental than Rogers has managed to be thus far.

Rogers winces. “I couldn’t ever be with another guy. You—him—that was it.”

Barnes breathes through that for a second then plows forward. “I had it wrong. I thought you’d want to fix me back to the guy I was before. Noble. Straight lines. And that’d mean pretending, or—or remembering. But this guy that you actually _are_ …I like you. And this guy that I am right now, I think, maybe, I can help you?”

And god, that comes out so weak and uncertain that Barnes immediately wants the words back. To make it worse Rogers cocks his head, like he has no idea what Barnes is saying.

“It was really hard,” Barnes chokes out. It’s getting more difficult to talk. He’s maybe never talked this much in a day; he’s not making a great case for himself, here. “At the beginning. I know what it’s like. How you got here. I know. So. I think I can help. ‘Cause I think, maybe,” and here it comes easier, for reasons he doesn’t examine too closely, “that I’m still fucked up the same way I was before, somehow, and that makes you and me fit together even if I don’t remember. We’re not straight lines, there are all these weird sharp pieces and I can fucking _breathe_. Yeah, you still scare the shit out of me but I can still breathe with you in the room.”

Rogers is silent, studying him. Then he leans forward, knees drawing up and elbows propped on them, his expression intent. “Tell me something about you. This…the guy you are.”

For a second Barnes can’t think of a damn thing; but then of course: “I like My Chemical Romance.”

Rogers does the head-tilt thing again. “I don’t know what that is…?”

“It’s,” Barnes trails off, hands opening and closing in search of words to grasp and helpless to answer. _It’s a pop-punk music group. It’s a bunch of guys that are actually not-great musicians who take themselves way too seriously. It’s a life preserver cast to a drowning man, because if these fucked-up not-great musicians with all kinds of personal problems can get through the day, why not me? It’s_ , and here Barnes’ inner voice starts to sound like Sam, _it’s a perfect outlet for someone who doesn’t know how to process his feelings unless Gerard Way is screaming about_ those exact feelings _at decibels that could lift the sky._

“It’s a band,” he says finally, and hopes that he has time to make Rogers understand. Though, God, what if Rogers doesn’t like MCR? Barnes might have to kill him.

“So you like this band,” says Rogers and that sounds so inconsequential. Barnes will definitely have to revisit that point later, for better or for worse. “And I know you’ve worked with SHIELD, taking down HYDRA. And…don’t go out the window, again, okay? You like getting bossed around.” Barnes twitches but manages not to run for the hills; Rogers gets this expression like he’s hopeful and trying not to show it. It’s not a familiar look for his face. “What else? You don’t have to…I’d like to hear.”

Which is all fine and fucking good but Barnes is out of words. He looks down at his hands, one metal and one bruised, and has nothing. How can he account for the last seven years? He’s killed a lot of people. He has a fuckton of cats. Sometimes he wakes up and the edge of the bed feels like it’s across a mountain range; but he scales it anyway, dragging up this body that remembers all the hurts it endured on his behalf.

“I want you to come home with me,” he scrapes out, and that’s it. He can feel himself hit some invisible inner wall and slide down to sit, crumpled, at its base.

After a minute Steve murmurs, “Okay.”


	14. Throw on a black dress, mix in with the lot/You might wake up and realize you’re someone you’re not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in this chapter for consensual but under-negotiated kink and resulting panic attack. See notes at the end of the chapter for details.
> 
> IT'S DONE. IT'S FINALLY FUCKING DONE. CHRIST.

SHIELD has already buried Phil Coulson and given a flag to his elderly parents. None of _them_ were present, of course: it went against SHIELD protocol but even if it hadn’t, none of them wanted anything to do with a couple of grieving civilians. They’re a different breed of person—maybe a different species, even. Phil Coulson had parents but part of him had belonged to _them_ , and that part was as alien as flying sharks over Stark Tower.

Once Clint is weaned off the narcos, they have their own wake for Coulson on his rooftop: Clint, Natasha, Sam, Sharon Carter, Hill, and a few other SHIELD agents that keep glancing at the big, bearded guy in the corner like they really, really wish they had brought some facial recognition software.

Steve keeps himself half in shadows, nursing beer after beer. Once Barnes finally accepts that Natasha has Clint’s six, he wanders over to Steve and gets a strained smile. “Sounds like a helluva guy,” Steve says, nodding to the clumps of people caught in reminiscing. No one without super-soldier hearing would catch their conversation at this distance. “Wish I coulda known him better.”

Setting his hip against the edge of the brick wall at Steve’s back, Barnes folds his arms across his chest. It’s probably not a smart move to stand this close to each other in public: he’s got a cloaking skin on his arm courtesy of Natasha and his hair is still blond and spiked, but in proximity he and Rogers are probably less easily disguisable than if they stand apart. They are somehow more, together, a couple of parts still figuring out their sum.

It's been three weeks since Peru and while Ross hasn’t shown up at Sam’s house with handcuffs, it isn’t exactly smooth sailing, either. Sam and Steve had liked each other right away, which had set off a wholly-unexpected amount of jealousy in Barnes, which had given Sam an ethical crisis about becoming directly involved in the life of a former client. That, on top of Clint’s silent yet overwhelming grief, had driven Barnes out of Sam’s house back to his own, neglected apartment. It’d turned out to be an okay thing, though: it’d broken the seal and they had peeled apart, Natasha taking Clint back to his apartment and Steve hunkering down with Sam. That hadn’t exactly helped the jealousy situation, but nobody has run too far away. They’re gelling up a little—a different type of team than the one that took on flying sharks in Manhattan, maybe not quite the one that Phil Coulson would’ve hoped for, but the one he left behind.

So long as they’re within phone call from each other, General Ross probably won’t make a move on any of them. They all know it and that, if nothing else, is reason enough to stay close.

At the opposite end of the roof, Stark has made an appearance in one of his suits. Barnes watches him land and doesn’t move, even after he feels Steve glance in his direction. They’ve been in contact, he and Stark, in only the most circuitous ways: batting leaks back and forth in the media, feeding info to intermediaries. Natasha is about two seconds away from killing them both with her bare hands but hell, it’s worked thus far. Maybe at some point they’ll even speak to each other directly.

Sam wanders over to introduce his new girlfriend, who is a former cop and not Natasha; Barnes feels kind of relieved for everyone involved. Knight has a robotic right arm and nods at Barnes like she’s not fooled by the fake skin covering his left one. He nods back. Sam and Steve trade verbal jabs—they’re good at expressing affection with their words, in ways that Barnes will probably never be. Maybe he was, once, but that’s not who he is now, so he stands back and tries not to feel insecure. He’s getting better at that. It helps that Knight does nothing except raise her eyebrows.

Stark is wandering over. They’re all aware of his approach in their own ways: Steve and Sam as soldiers keeping watch over the perimeter, Knight and Barnes as something more wounded and skittish. They’ve both been hurt, Barnes thinks, and he likes Knight more for this knowledge.

Stark actually whistles the standoff music from _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_ but then waves his hand. “At ease, Manchurian candidate, what the holy fuck did you do to your hair?”

Shrugging, Barnes answers, “Romanoff.”

“Tricksy minx, never take your eyes off her or she’ll apparently give you a terrifying makeover. You look like Sid Vicious got swole. Or, wait, they had you frozen for the eighties, do you even know who that is? How hard am I going to have to recalibrate my pop culture references?”

“He knew Eminem,” Sam suggests, the fucking traitor.

Stark makes finger guns in Sam’s direction, then refocuses on Barnes and Steve. “So who’s got the shield this weekend? Is it a timeshare thing or do you—”

“I don’t have it,” Steve answers flatly.

Stark casts Barnes a dubious look. “Sole custody? Really?”

“No,” Barnes says, as much for Steve’s benefit as Stark’s. They haven’t talked about this: there have been a number of late-night conversations in Sam’s backyard but this hasn’t been one of them.

“Technically Sam has it,” Steve amends.

Wordlessly Sam puts his hands up. Beside him, Knight looks impressed. Stark waves his hand, apparently already bored with the conversation. “Whoever’s playing frisbee golf this week, I don’t care. We need to talk, _all_ of us.”

Steve straightens up. “Why, what’s happened?”

“Nothing, yet, and I’d like to keep things that way. Less _avenging_ and more _preventative maintenance_ , though that really doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? The Maintainers? The Preventers? The Booster Shots to Prevent Psychotic Villains? Anyway. It’s been six months since SHIELD went belly-up and there are plenty of bad dudes circling the corpse. Time we got the band back together.”

Barnes shifted against the corner of the brick wall. “Ross.”

“Pffft. Dead in the water. Once Wakanda opened its borders, the UN sank any kind of registry legislation—that whole _country_ would have to be registered and not one of them would sign. The powers that be want Wakandan tech way more than they care about us, which, I would be offended if I were not _humble_ enough—” Here he pauses and looks around the group; no one has any reaction. “ _Thank you_. I am humble enough to say, damn. _Damn_ , Wakanda. So what’s a good day for you guys, Wednesdays?”

Barnes stands back and watches Stark barrel through the conversation, alternately self-aggrandizing and making strong points about planetary defenses. Giant flying alien whales had to grow somewhere, is his main argument; Barnes can’t argue with it, though Stark seems to want an argument, particularly from Steve.

Or maybe it’s just Stark’s way of getting what he wants, because finally Steve stands up and ends the conversation with, “That’s _enough_ , Tony. We’re at a wake, and this roof isn’t secure. We’ll assemble next week—I’ll contact everyone to let them know when.”

“Well, if you insist,” Stark replies and promptly jets off, leaving Steve with his hands on his hips, shaking his head slowly.

They leave a while after that, Steve having lost his equilibrium and Barnes tugged along in his wake. When he touches Steve’s arm in the stairwell he gets a surprised glance, and visible goosebumps that travel down Steve’s forearm.

When he jerks his head to the side, he gets Steve’s silent presence following him through the streets.

It’s a warm night, right before the real heat of summer. Barnes makes himself walk slowly, both to let Steve have some time to think and to let himself process through the panic of what he’s doing. People do this every day: take someone home. Sleep with them. The women from the club did it, why not Barnes? He’s been dancing around this ever since Steve came back and he thinks it must be _part_ of the reason that Steve came back, and Barnes hasn’t been holding up his part of the bargain. If they’re going to move forward with Stark, with The Avengers in whatever form they take, then this…this needs to not be something in the way of he and Steve working together. It’s something that he wants, right? He got off on watching Steve with other people, the next logical step is him and Steve together.

He rolls that thought around in his head like a train on a circular track all the way to the front door of his building, all the way up his stairs, through _his_ door, and into his apartment. There, it leaves him, and he slumps against the wall of his entryway, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor.

On the edge of his vision, Steve’s feet track into his living room, stop, and turn a slow circle to face him. Barnes tries but he can’t quite bring himself to look up for long: just impressions of Steve’s uncertain expression, his wide shoulders in the dusk-darkened room, the way he has his hands stuffed in his pockets, too.

Eventually Steve goes down the hall into the bedroom. He comes back after twenty-three seconds and asks, “How many cats do you _have_?”

“Um,” Barnes says. He dares to squint around the living room; only four are immediately visible. “About eleven? I think? They’re not really _mine_ , they just—come—around.”

He trails off as he dares to actually look at Steve, who has a tiny calico kitten tucked into the crook of his elbow. It’s attacking his fingers, which Steve waggles absently in its face while he frowns at Barnes.

There’s too long a pause, in which Steve just _looks_ at him. Barnes imagines striking a seductive pose and recoils from the thought. Steve puts the kitten down on the floor and Barnes wants to go out the door behind him the way he did at the hotel in Lima, but he makes himself stay still. He can do this. He can have semi-normal sex with his—with the guy he’s attracted to. There’s no reason to jump out a window.

“I thought,” Steve says, “that you were avoiding me. You’re not who you were, but there are still pieces in there that I recognize and I thought—it felt like you needed me to stay away. Was I wrong?”

Barnes grits his teeth and shakes his head once, sharply. Not for the first time he misses the weight of his long hair: right now, it would be falling close on either side of his face as a protective shield. He’s too exposed.

“I’m gonna need some kinda hint, pal,” Steve says. “I don’t know what’s going on. It seemed like you wanted me to come home with you, but now you’re over there lookin’ like you’re about two seconds from climbing the walls. You know…you know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, right?”

“I fucking _want to_ ,” Barnes snaps. It feels like there are two fists clenched around the tops of his lungs, crushing them downward.

“Hey,” Steve says. He sits down on the couch, narrowly missing another cat, who scrambles up and away with narrowed eyes that promise to pee on discarded clothing later. Steve doesn’t seem to notice; he’s watching Barnes’ face. “It’s okay.”

It’s pretty absurd to watch this big blond giant try to make himself smaller, less threatening—absurd and kind of the opposite of the point. Barnes is a car stuck between gears: he wants Steve to grab him, put him on the ground on his hands and knees, and he wants Steve to stay waaaaay the fuck over there.

Maybe that’s one of the pieces that Steve can recognize, because he says, “Okay. Stay right where you are. Get on your knees.”

Barnes twitches, staring. By now it’s almost midnight and Barnes’ apartment is the opposite of Steve’s fishbowl; minimal streetlight filters in through the window. The serum gives him just enough nightvision, though, to make out Steve’s face. It’s not predatory like it was before, but it’s suddenly…implacable.

Steve’s head tilts to one side. “You can either do it, or not.”

Barnes twitches again then slowly, carefully slides down the wall until his knees hit the floor with a bump. A couple of the goddamned cats take this as an opportunity to come over and bump their heads against his hips and hands. He nudges them away without taking his eyes off Steve, who smiles at the cats.

“You must take good care of them,” Steve says.

“Not—really. They just started coming around.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth twitches up. “Speaking as the original stray that you took in, it’s a lot more than that. Take off your jacket.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you to. You can either do it, or not.”

After a minute Barnes obeys, pulling the jacket from his shoulders and letting it fall to the floor beside him. It lands on one of the younger cats and she mewls as she digs her way out from its warm leather folds.

“Good. Now stop breathing.”

Barnes hadn’t realized he’d been nearly panting until he stops. His fingers twitch where he’s awkwardly let them rest on his thighs. He can feel his pulse in his ears, in his stomach, in his kneecaps. He’s not hard—he’s still too scared for that—but it feels like every inch of him is _awake_ , shaking off decades of sleep to a new awareness. Like he has a million eyes and they’re all trained on Steve Rogers.

After a couple of beats Steve says, “Breathe in.”

Barnes breathes in.

“Stop.”

Barnes stops. Steve’s fingers are moving, tapping against his own knee. The rhythm is a heartbeat, a metronome, a ticking clock.

After eight taps Steve says, “Breathe out.”

He keeps on like that until Barnes is breathing slow and deep. Then he says, “Take off your shirt and come over here.”

Barnes fumbles with the bottom of his t-shirt, hesitating. He knows he should—they should talk. Despite Steve’s intuition, he’s not fucking _psychic_ : he’s read the file and he knew Bucky Barnes, but he doesn’t know _Barnes_ and there are things that he should know. The words just won’t come out of Barnes’ mouth and so he drags his shirt off over his head.

When he starts to stand up, though, Steve stops him. “I didn’t say you could stand up. Come over here.”

Barnes flushes hot; it’s hard to tell why, he has no fucking idea what’s happening inside his own head right now. Part of him wants to start reciting some lyrics, but that would mean taking one ounce of his attention off of Steve and he doubts he’s even capable of that right now.

So instead he puts his head down and slowly, shakily crawls across the floor to kneel at Steve’s feet.

“Give me your arm.”

Steve puts his hand out, palm up, on his knee. For a half-delirious moment Barnes thinks that he wants the _arm_ , as if Barnes can pop it off and hand it over; part of him wishes it could be that simple, except it’s his—it’s him, more so than any fragment of memory. His arm remembers what he cannot and oh. Oh, that’s what Steve is really asking for.

Of course he gives it: turns his hand upwards, too, and lets his wrist fall across Steve’s palm, which curls automatically around it as if to keep Barnes from ripping it away again. Not that he could—not while Steve is looking at his hand so intently, reaching to touch the fingertips with his own.

Barnes can’t stop the automatic twitch. Steve looks down at him. “How much do you feel?”

Words feel a little syrupy; it takes Barnes a moment to reply. “Some. Pressure, temperature, proprioception. Not a whole lot of pain receptors below the elbow.”

Steve’s fingers slide up his forearm, as if chasing that extra layer of nerve endings, then begin to trace back and force along the edges of the plates. He presses each one with his thumb as if testing its strength. It is, objectively speaking, a weird sensation. The arm was designed for combat and all its sensory input gets translated through that lens. Barnes doesn’t even want to think about the re-wiring they did in his brain to accommodate the fucking arm.

Whatever they did, they never counted on this: Steve Rogers slowly and methodically examining every inch of Winter Soldier’s arm, from the coupling joints of his knuckles to the twisted skin where it anchors to his body, where he presses his palm to the skin, feeling the metal bands underneath that cover his ribs and collarbone.

Pulling Barnes forward, Steve curls over him to examine the back of the join, tracing the edge of Barnes’ shoulderblade. Barnes winds up with his cheek pressed against the inside of Steve’s knee and he blinks heavy eyelids. The bulk of Steve’s torso is blocking out the light; when Barnes inhales he can smell him everywhere. His mind wanders back to what Steve said in Lima, that he’d known Barnes by his scent alone.

He doesn’t know Steve’s scent by heart but fuck, he wants the time to learn.

Steve sits back and the protective cocoon over Barnes collapses. The knee under his cheekbone moves away and a whimper escapes his throat as he’s left too exposed.

Fingers close around his throat—not constricting, but firm enough that when Barnes swallows it hurts a little. He wants to swallow again but the hand is pulling his chin upward. It’s right to the edge of too much and he flails out, the metal hand clamping tight around Steve’s wrist. Even as strong as those bones are, if he tightens his grip they will break.

Steve is straight-backed on the couch, frowning down at him. Gears grind in Barnes: he doesn’t want that expression, he wants to be good, but he can’t help his body's instinct to move hard and fast to neutralize the threat.

“Stop,” Steve says firmly. It’s The Voice. “Let go of my wrist.”

Barnes grits his teeth. “I fucking _can’t_.”

Steve tilts his head to the side again, studying Barnes’ eyes. He’s almost infuriatingly calm, like he doesn’t understand how close they are to disaster—or like he does and he’s so sure of his ability to counter that disaster.

“We’re not gonna do anything else,” Steve says. “Just this. You’re gonna sit right here at my feet and you’re gonna let me hold your neck. Do you want that?”

Of all the wild sexual fantasies Barnes has envisioned—and he’s envisioned _plenty_ over the last few weeks—this is somehow even more terrifying, and thrilling. “Yes,” he manages to croak.

“Good. Now let go of my wrist.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. This is your body, you control it. Either you do it or you don’t.”

Now Barnes kind of _wants_ to hit him—not hard, just to make a point. Except then the hand around his throat _shakes_ him and the idea rattles out of his head. Holding Steve’s gaze is suddenly too much and he lets his eyes slide down to the base of his throat, that vulnerable patch of skin that he’d pressed his knuckles to back when HYDRA had tried to burn his fucking face off.

It _hurts_ to be here. He’s so close. Steve looks like an atomic bomb could go off outside and he wouldn’t notice, so maybe they’re _both_ flinging themselves into that same dark mouth. They're _both_ so close and Barnes can't even imagine getting past this but—fuck, he wants to.

He shifts his grip on Steve’s wrist, lifting fingers that immediately resettle. Fuck. Fuck. Okay. He takes his hand away and gets as far as an inch before the alarm inside his head becomes a screech and he clamps it back in place.

Arousal curdles to shame; but when he glances up, Steve’s expression is calm. Implacable. “I can do this all day, pal.”

“Fuck you, I _can’t_.” Horribly, Barnes’ eyes have started to burn.

“Yeah you can. Let go of my wrist.”

Tears well up and spill out. His body wants to move, at least to squirm, but he desperately doesn’t want to give Steve the impression that he’s trying to get away. He doesn’t want Steve to let go of him. Steve can’t let go, so Barnes has to. He has to. They’ve got this close, they’ve come this far, they can’t—he’s got to do this.

He takes his hand away and manages to put it on Steve’s knee, mirroring the position of his right hand, before the thrill of panic gets too much and he grabs Steve’s wrist again. Steve doesn’t waver; just sits and waits him out while Barnes takes his hand away again, sobs, brings it back, takes it away again.

He gets his hand on Steve’s knee and forces himself not to grip there, instead. The whole rest of his body is rigid with the effort not to move, to keep his hands where they are, not to rear back, not to grab a fucking weapon.

Seconds tick by as he hangs in Steve’s grip, his mind and body rigid with the effort not to move and his gaze fixed on Steve’s jaw. Then—a soft tapping.

“Breathe out,” Steve says softly.

Barnes hadn’t realized that he’d been holding his breath. It bursts out of him too fast. Steve’s fingers don’t alter their rhythm. The hand that isn’t holding Barnes by the throat is tapping his flesh-and-bone hand.

When Steve tells him to breathe in it’s like a slow warm wave breaking over his back. He did it. He let go of Steve’s hand. He’s _doing_ it. Christ.

Steve’s jaw moves, creases appearing as he smiles. “There you go,” he says, and _fuck_. Barnes drags his gaze up to meet Steve’s eyes and they are warm, pleased. He looks like he wants to eat Barnes whole. “Good. Good. Breathe in.”

Barnes breathes in and wants to fucking _cry_ with relief. He is crying, maybe, a little bit. He did it. Steve’s touching his face, brushing over his cheeks, telling him he’s doing good; but more importantly his iron grip around Barnes’ throat hasn’t budged an inch.

It doesn’t move even when Steve reels him in closer, shifting Barnes to rest sideways with his legs tucked under him and his shoulders pressed against Steve’s leg. That’s even better, with Steve curled over him like he was before. Nothing’s going to get at Barnes from under Steve’s heavy, looming body. He did it, he let go, he doesn’t have to fight Steve or anyone else.

All Barnes has to do is be still, and God it is heaven.

It lasts a while, or he thinks it does. Long enough that Steve moves them twice. They end up on the couch with Barnes on top, his head resting on Steve’s chest and Steve’s hand still resting on his throat, not gripping so tight anymore but still a heavy weight. He feels it every time he draws slow, even breaths.

At some point he must fall asleep, because he wakes to Steve gently nudging him to lie on his side on the couch—dislodging three cats in the process that have curled in the crooks of their knees or laid down on their backs—so that Steve can get up. He shuffles slowly into the kitchen. It’s still dark out, but there’s a gray-blue light in the room like dawn is somewhere nearby.

One of the cats stands in the middle of the living room and stretches, its back arched. That looks good so Barnes does it, too, and feels a couple of things pop. His head feels a little stuffy and his mouth wants to wobble even though he’s not upset or cold. Distantly he hears the fridge door open and he frowns, sitting up.

Steve is in the kitchen, digging something out of the fridge. That’s too far away. Barnes suddenly remembers the last time that Steve was in a kitchen after doing something like this, crying over the sink, and the memory is enough to drive him to his wobbly feet.

That earns him a quick, strangely guilty look. “Hey,” Steve says. “I’m just getting—I gotta figure out how to open this thing, pal, you wanna wait—okay, I guess not?”

Barnes has staggered over to where Steve is trying to stab one of the MREs open with a fork, and slumped against him. Not with his whole body—that, apparently, is still too much for him unless Steve has a hand on his throat. But he puts his forehead against Steve’s shoulder and leans against him. The muscle under his brow moves and he tenses; but Steve only brings a hand up to cup the back of his head, holding him there.

After a minute in which Steve continues to struggle with the MRE, one-handed, Barnes says, “Tell me something about you.”

The ripping of thick plastic pauses, then resumes. “Whaddya wanna hear?”

“Something not in any of the bullshit history books. How did—were we together before the war?”

Steve huffs a laugh. “No. Well, sort of. It was complicated. We never fooled around. But for a long time, you were all I had and I was all you had. I guess you could say we were kinda…fixed on each other. When we got older, you’d go out with girls and I’d be mad as a tomcat for two days, so I’d make you pay for it any way I could.” Something touched the corner of Barnes’ mouth: a raisin, from the trail mix pack. He took it between his teeth and managed not to flinch at the way Steve’s fingers brushed his lips. “Anybody else woulda sent me packing,” Steve goes on. “But you just took it. You’d still go out, but then you’d come home to me and we’d—hell, we didn’t know what we were doing. They got names for everything these days. Maybe they even did back then, but we didn’t know any better until we met Peggy.”

The inside of Barnes’ brain still feels syrupy so it takes a second to place the name. “Margaret Carter?”

“Yeah,” Steve sighs. When Barnes lifts his head to look, Steve’s face is wistful but not devastated. “She’d been around the block a few more times than you or I, thank God. Whenever we’d get real messed up during the war she’d find us someplace quiet on leave and help us get our heads back on straight. She—God. I know you don’t want to remember and I don’t blame you, but I wish you could remember _her_. The first time she got you to go down was in Paris and you just sat there with your head in her lap. I wanted charcoal, oils, a camera, _anything._ I wish I had _anything_ to show you now. There are all these people who think they know the first goddamned thing about us or how things were back then, and it’s all a fucking _lie_.”

Taking a deep breath, Barnes manages to put an arm around Steve’s tense shoulders. Steve sags against him and it’s—bearable, for as long as it takes Steve to pull himself back together.

When he moves away he pushes some kind of energy bar into Barnes’ hand without looking at him; after a moment’s consideration, Barnes carefully unwraps it, takes a bite, then holds the bar up to Steve’s mouth.

Steve startles a little but then huffs and takes a bite, too. He still looks too much like he did before, sobbing a dead man’s name over the kitchen sink, so Barnes touches his hair, letting its soft strands move through his metal fingers. It’s still brown but the gold-colored roots have started to peek out along Steve’s scalp.

A little more of the tension seeps out of Steve and he smiles, willingly to share the rest of the energy bar. Barnes thinks about being wrong about a lot of things and smiles back.

 

-o-

 

The facility in upstate New York is a repurposed light arms factory with attached business center. Stark has moved all of the machinery out and put in obstacle courses, training mats, gym equipment, and living quarters. He leads them through the building, gesturing grandly as he goes and talking fast enough to keep anyone else from objecting.

No one does, though Clint tosses him some sardonic flack. It’s good to hear some life in his voice again and if having Stark around is the price they pay, then Barnes is more than ready to ante up.

That’s unkind, though: Stark has obviously put a lot of effort, not to mention money, into this. He very clearly wants them to like it, to want to live there—or, well, most of them, anyway. There’s a silent, tacit agreement that none of the available living quarters belong to Barnes; it isn’t offered and he doesn’t expect it. But Clint and Natasha and Bruce Banner and Sam all have rooms ready for them. Thor, the big blond Viking space prince who creeps Barnes the fuck out—something about the way he moves is 100% Not Human and Barnes’ brain Does Not Like It—apparently has his own realm but tromps through the place with them admiring the obstacle courses and chatting amiably in a weird language with one of the robots that trails after Stark.

Barnes is a little surprised about Sam, enough to corner him while the others break for small finger sandwiches and chit-chat. “Is this you breaking down? ‘Cause I thought I had more time on that clock.”

Sam laughs, shaking his head. “Naw, man, this is me trying to _not_ sit at home and have a breakdown. I admit I wasn’t too sure about it when Stark first called me up, but with SHIELD and the UN both backing down, the number of people giving orders around here is hitting, oh, zero, and I figure that’s either something I wanna join or something that needs a few level heads in the mix. Plus, I get to fly again.”

“I thought flying was kinda the problem.” Sam hasn’t talked too much about his nightmares and anxieties, but Barnes can guess.

Sam does that thing where he rocks his head from one side to the other, considering his response. “Yeah—wasn’t too sure about it either. But man, sometimes you don’t know how much you’ve missed something until you’re flying a nuke over DC rush hour traffic.”

Barnes laughs a little, as much because they both _can_ laugh about their most recent adventure as any actual amusement at the memory. In the corner of his eye he catches Steve glancing over at him with a surprised expression that softens when Barnes meets his gaze. Steve has been helping himself to the finger sandwiches and there’s a smear of mustard on the side of his mouth that Barnes wants to lick off. Not that he’d be able to do that without immediately having a panic attack and running to Vermont for a few days to let his body escape from the things it still instinctively fears, but he _wants_ to. That feels like an important first step.

“Wow, those are some puppy eyes you’re rocking there, Cap,” Stark says. He doesn’t so much as glance in Barnes’ direction. “C’mon, tear your lovey-dovey gaze away for five seconds while I show you the entertainment AI.”

Rolling his eyes, Barnes turns back to Sam. “What about the VA?”

“Oh man. Did I not tell you? They fired my ass.”

“Wait, what?”

Sam doesn’t look too upset, just waves his hand around while holding a baby carrot smeared with hummus. “Well, they let me resign. Can’t be a peer counselor when you’re running around saving the world with one of your clients. I told you, man, there’re ethical boundary rules about this sorta thing and I pretty much blew past all of them so it was either stay at the VA, or do this. And I’m not gonna lie: I’m more of a soldier than a psychiatrist.”

Clint is over at the window, investigating the sightlines to the building while Natasha pokes hopefully at the refrigerator-sized espresso machine in the corner. Thor the space prince has discovered the cannon array in the weapons nook and weirdly seems to be having a conversation with _that_ , too. Stark has started playing music through speakers in the ceiling, commanding the AI to skip songs after less than ten seconds of each and narrating the history of popular music to Steve as he does so. Banner has retreated to a couch in the corner and seems totally wrapped up in whatever’s on his iPad. Fury, who’s entered the room quietly, is standing back and seems to be watching the Stark/Steve interplay in search of the perfect moment to sweep in and interrupt.

“Think we could do with a psychiatrist or two,” Barnes points out.

“Yeah, well, I ain’t gonna be it. Go see Nikki or talk to one of your cats.”

“You didn’t let me finish. I think we need a psychiatrist, but I’d rather have a friend.”

It’s Sam’s turn to make some puppy eyes, though he covers it well by stuffing food in his mouth. “Stop being well-adjusted and emotionally-healthy, man, it’s creepy.”

Barnes starts to smirk, but then there’s a loud G-note emanating from the mansion’s loudspeakers and he’s somehow a lot more _awake_ than he was a second ago, as if his head was a church bell rung by the sound of a single piano key.

Except then Stark says, “Ugh, we can skip the late aughts, too much emo—Jarvis, skip ahead to Wu-Tang Clan, collected solo albums.”

“Whoooa no,” Clint says at the same time that Natasha says, “You want to take that back, Tony,” at the same time that Sam says, “Oh Jesus,” at the same time that _Fury_ says, “Goddammit, Stark.”

Stark actually takes two steps back like he’s trying to keep them all in his sightline. Clint starts laughing, leaning against the window, while Steve and Thor look deeply confused.

“Okay, first,” Stark says, pointing a finger at Fury. “I think we agreed on no more fucking trapdoors into my security system.”

“I let him in,” Natasha interjects.

Stark points his stylus at her. “No feeding the strays. Second, what the hell? Did I drop through a portal into the aftermath of a Warped Tour? Is Linkin Park here? Is Pete Wentz? Because I still owe that guy like two grand from that time with the thing that never happened, so—what? Oh, Jesus,” he adds as Barnes pointedly sidles into his sightline. “Of course. Of course it’s you. You were even wearing _eyeliner_ before, and now _you’re blond_ , Jesus Christ would you fucking blink. I’ll play your dumb emo music. Jarvis, play his dumb emo music.”

“Pause, Jarvis,” Barnes says, then folds his arms and leans back against the counter. “You ever heard of an induction trigger sequence, Stark?”

Stark narrows his eyes. “I’m…guessing this is in the context of psychology? It’s a method of brainwashing—repeating certain words aloud in order to induce hypnosis. The CIA developed it back in the ‘60’s.”

“No.” It’s Steve who speaks; his gaze is on Barnes. “The CIA got their techniques from HYDRA.”

“Right,” Stark says. “Right, fuck, of course they did. Because you’re the _original_ MK Ultra.”

Barnes dips his head in acknowledgment. “You ever heard of a self-directed counter-induction stimulus?”

Banner, who has gotten up from the couch in the corner and warily shuffled closer to the group, frowns. “That’s theoretically impossible. The whole point of an induction sequence is that it hijacks the brain’s executive functions, the subject shouldn’t be _able_ to self-direct.”

“Turns out,” Barnes says, “if you get so obsessed with a certain album to the point that you listen to it every day for seven years and replay certain songs off that album multiple times whenever you’re stressed out as a self-soothing technique, _your brain can do all sorts of weird shit_.”

Banner looks doubtful but also intrigued in a weirdly hungry way. Which, great, that’s gonna be fun; Barnes barely understands how he did what he did, he’s not exactly confident that he can teach Banner to tame the Hulk with the dulcet tones of DMX or whatever he’s thinking about right now.

“I do not understand,” Thor says. “You speak of Midgardian bards? Of what do they sing?”

“Death, vampires, and melodrama, mostly,” Sam answers.

“Those seem worthy subjects for any ballad. And many a time music has inspired warriors to great feats upon the battlefield. Come, friend Stark, let us hear these bards.”

Okay, the space Viking might be all right. Barnes says, “My Chemical Romance saved my life. And by extension, your life, and the lives of everyone else on this planet. I’m not saying you have to like them,” he tries not to look at Steve as he says this, “but that band, that music, saved us all.”

“Okay, okay,” Stark says quickly, “that’s enough emotional honesty and earnestness, I’m getting hives. Jarvis, break out the eyeliner and hit play—wait, start at the beginning of the album. Anybody want sushi?”

Steve has spent the conversation edging closer; when Barnes glances over he quirks his eyebrows in silent question. Barnes shrugs and hopes that he’s understood. He hopes that they have long years ahead of them, long enough to learn to speak without words. Because words _suck_.

From the speakers in the ceiling comes the high beep of a heart monitor, and he figures this is as good a place to start as any.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Barnes engage in a D/s scene that they have both consented to but haven't properly negotiated, during which Barnes experiences a panic attack that Steve helps him work through.


End file.
